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Contested psychiatric ontology and feminist critique : 'female sexual dysfunction' and the diagnostic and statistical manual
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Angel, Katherine (2012) Contested psychiatric ontology and feminist critique : 'female sexual dysfunction' and the diagnostic and statistical manual. History of the Human Sciences, Vol.25 (No.4). pp. 3-24. doi:10.1177/0952695112456949 ISSN 0952-6951.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0952695112456949
Abstract
In this article I discuss the emergence of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD) within American psychiatry and beyond in the postwar period, setting out what I believe to be important and suggestive questions neglected in existing scholarship. Tracing the nomenclature within successive editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), I consider the reification of the term 'FSD', and the activism and scholarship that the rise of the category has occasioned. I suggest that analysis of FSD benefits from scrutiny of a wider range of sources (especially since the popular and scientific cross-pollinate). I explore the multiplicity of FSD that emerges when one examines this wider range, but I also underscore a reinscribing of anxieties about psychogenic aetiologies. I then argue that what makes the FSD case additionally interesting, over and above other conditions with a contested status, is the historically complex relationship between psychiatry and feminism that is at work in contemporary debates. I suggest that existing literature on FSD has not yet posed some of the most important and salient questions at stake in writing about women’s sexual problems in this period, and can only do this when the relationship between 'second-wave' feminism, 'post-feminism', psychiatry and psychoanalysis becomes part of the terrain to be analysed, rather than the medium through which analysis is conducted.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman | ||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | ||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Sexual disorders, Women -- Sexual behavior, Women -- Psychology | ||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | History of the Human Sciences | ||||
| Publisher: | Sage | ||||
| ISSN: | 0952-6951 | ||||
| Official Date: | 2012 | ||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | Vol.25 | ||||
| Number: | No.4 | ||||
| Page Range: | pp. 3-24 | ||||
| DOI: | 10.1177/0952695112456949 | ||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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