What Can We Know About Sex?: A Lacanian Study of Sex and Gender

Despite the progress made by psychoanalysis since Freud’s discovery of the sexual nature of the unconscious, analysts have tended to explore psychical causality independently of the role of the biological factors at play in sexuality. What Can We Know About Sex? explains how Lacan’s work allows us to make new links between the sexual laws of discourse, gender and what Freud called the ‘biological rock’ in human life, allowing a new perspective not only on the history of the sexual couple but on contemporary developments of sexuality in the 21st century. Gisele Chaboudez’s insights demonstrate that the old phallic logic that has been so dominant is now in the process of being dismantled, opening up the question of how people can relate sexually and what forms of jouissance are at stake for contemporary subjectivity.

What Can We Know About Sex? will be a key text for analysts, academics and students of feminism, gender and sexuality.