Katie Gentile

It Doesn't Happen Here: Eating Disorders in an Ethnically Diverse Sample of Economically Disadvantaged, Urban College Students

The bulk of eating disorder studies have focused on white, middle-upper class women, excluding ethnically and economically diverse women and men. Accordingly, our knowledge of prevalence rates and risk factors is reliant on this narrow literature. To expand upon the current literature, we examined eating disorders in ethnically diverse low-income, urban college students. We surveyed 884 incoming freshmen during an orientation class to assess the frequency of eating disorder diagnosis and the risk factors of child physical abuse and sexual abuse before and after age 13. We found 10% of our sample received an eating disorder diagnosis, 12.2% of the women and 7.3% of the men. The majority of these students were Latino/a or “other,” with White women receiving the fewest diagnoses. For all women, both child physical abuse and both indices of sexual abuse contributed equally to the development of an eating disorder. For men only the sexual abuse indices contributed to an eating disorder diagnosis. These results indicate that ethnic minority populations do suffer from relatively high rates of self-reported eating disorders and that a history of trauma is a significant risk factor for eating disorders in these diverse populations of both women and men.

Community Violence, Social Support Networks, Ethnic Group Differences, and Male Perpetration of Intimate Partner Violence

The authors examined how witnessing community violence influenced social support networks and how these networks were associated with male-to-female intimate partner violence (IPV) in ethnically diverse male college students. The authors assessed whether male social support members themselves had perpetrated IPV (male network violence) and whether female social support members had been victimized by intimates (female network victimization). The results indicated an association between community violence and male network violence; both factors were significantly associated with higher levels of IPV. Furthermore, the relationship between community violence and IPV was partially mediated by male network violence. Additionally, the results indicated a moderated relationship such that male participants who reported the highest levels of exposure to community violence and male network violence were at highest risk for IPV. However, this relationship did not hold across all ethnicities and races. The findings suggest that the mechanisms associating community violence, networks, and IPV are multifaceted and differ across ethnicity and race.

What About the Baby? The New Cult of Domesticity and Media Images of Pregnancy

This article explores the explosion of images of pregnancy in the media since 9/11. Recent articles from The New York Times to academic journals have noted a marked increase in the representations of traditional gender roles since 2001, what the author here is comparing with the cult of domesticity that arose in the 19th century as an attempt at gaining cultural organization in a time of upheaval. According to Brown (2005), our culture is also facing the death of modernity—the promise of a better future. The author ties these seemingly disparate ideas together by quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing representations of pregnancy in the media. As the author details, the focus on pregnancy may be an attempt to instill faith in a future that has been rendered uncanny and unknowable by the recent awareness of our potential annihilation. The implications and dangers of this form of temporal linking are discussed.

Timing Development from Cleavage to Differentiation

Abstract This paper describes a psychoanalytic exploration of eighteen years of one womans diaries. These diaries document Hannahs struggle to come into being after a history of severe trauma and eating disorders. The diaries convey a detailed account of how the unspeakable, embodied remnants of sexual trauma become symbolized. Using her diaries as flexible transitional spaces, Hannah gradually begins playing with the structure of her text, creating bodies of herself and others within lists. Her use of lists within the diaries demonstrates that she develops the psychological capacities to differentiate and symbolize her abusive experiences only as she creates time. Integrating Loewalds (1980) concept of temporal linking, Winnicotts (1970, 1971) notion of psyche/soma development, and feminist criticism, this paper describes a theory of development where the analytic subject comes into being through the relational creation of time and space. This theory situates time as a unique and necessary space within which mind/body, self/other, and intrapsychic/culture are negotiated. Thus, this theory of time creates the potential space within which psychoanalytic and cultural subjectivities can be explored together. Hannahs use of lists illustrates this theory of temporal development.

The Business of Being Made: Exploring the Production of Temporalities in Assisted Reproductive Technologies

As with other forms of biotechnology, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have become a normative part of womens reproductive health care with critical impact on womens subjectivities. Yet as these technologies have proliferated, feminist and cultural theories have taken up the challenges of theorizing the subjectivities produced through these interventions, while psychoanalysis has remained relatively mute, and certainly uncritical. This article uses interview research conducted by a psychoanalyst with women and men who went through some form of ART. Of particular interest is the creation of liminal and asynchronous temporalities that situate people in spaces marked by a particular futurity of being “not yet pregnant.” Within this uncertainty, temporal forms of affect regulation emerge for self-preservation, especially for survivors of sexual trauma, for whom ART interventions and a “confusion of tongues” surrounding them can be profoundly retraumatizing.

Animals as the Symptom of Psychoanalysis Or, The Potential for Interspecies Co-emergence in Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT Harold Searles urged psychoanalysis to incorporate animals and the nonhuman environment within the clinical space, claiming we ignore the nonhuman at our peril. But as Searles outlined, our relationships with these nonhuman entities is fraught with ambivalence. This paper details some of the ambivalences within Searles’ writings, including the ways he both described and seemed to enact defenses around human exceptionalism on the one hand and our chaotic merging with the world on the other. Searles described this conflict as occurring not only within the family romance but also shaping our relationships with the nonhuman objects and animals in our environment. In this light, polluting the Earth, according to Searles, is an unconscious act designed to foreclose the future for our progeny whom we unconsciously hate and envy. Integrating Searles’ conflicting ideas with current work on the nonhuman in cultural studies, this presentation explores the ambivalent dependence of the human on the nonhuman, the co-emergence of these categories and subjectivities, and ways to consciously link these areas of experiencing in our clinical and theoretical work.

Using Queer and Psychoanalytic Times to Explore the Troubling Temporalities of Fetal Personhood

This article was originally presented on a panel of psychoanalysts and queer theorists writing about time. The article integrates psychoanalytic and queer theories of temporality to explore the raft of new legislative proposals and laws imbuing the fetus with status as a person. These laws create drastic changes in the citizenship and rights of the pregnant woman, in particular women of color and economically disadvantaged women, who are subject to increasing levels of criminal justice surveillance. Exploring the affective dynamics of the cultural body, this fetishization of the fetus is conceptualized as a way of splitting off anxieties, containing them within the vulnerable fetal body who, in this fantasy, is in need of rescue from the irresponsible and dangerous maternal body. As such, the cultural body is described as playing with time and futurity in order to disavow feelings of humiliation and vulnerability in the face of increasing global instabilities.

Exploring the troubling temporalities produced by fetal personhood

This paper integrates queer and psychoanalytic theories of temporality to explore the raft of new laws and resulting cases that imbue the fetus with status as a person. The laws increasingly result in women being depicted as in a liminal state of “could be pregnant,” thus, as objects of heightened medical and social surveillance. Exploring the affective dynamics of the culture, I show that fetuses embody displaced anxieties and vulnerabilities such that fetal protection functions to reinforce dissociation. It becomes clear that fetal personhood laws reflect a form of temporally-based affect regulation in which the fetus comes to embody the promise of an otherwise tenuous future. Regulation is enacted through a criminal-justice–based form of future-oriented risk management that takes poor women and women of color as its main targets.

Is the Old Psychoanalytic Story Part of the Problem? Commentary on Article by Rheta Keylor and Roberta Apfel

This commentary responds to Keylor and Apfels (this issue) article on male infertility. The authors present a very important article about a subject that is undertheorized. Although they present important research and clinical material describing some mens experiences of infertility, their approach to masculinity is limited and keeps men in a box of phallocentricity that it seems would only add insult to injury for a man struggling with infertility. This commentary presents a brief overview of what fertility treatments typically entail and explores some ways in which cultural constructions of masculinity would be supported and threatened through these treatments. The cultural context of gender in fertility treatments is discussed. Questions about masculinity and fatherhood are raised for further exploration. Keylor and Apfels descriptions of the ways in which fertility treatments can reenact significant psychoanalytic themes of development are discussed and placed within a cultural context of gender.

The Collective Artistry of Activism: A Review of Making Trouble: Life and Politics

Lynne Segals autobiography upholds the feminist tradition of writing about womens marginalized experiences but she does so without creating the traditional unitary isolated subject. Consciously or not, she has written an autobiography that is psychosocial, often focusing on the social in favor of the psyche. This review discusses this unique book, which writes a life always within a rich cultural context. We are taken from her childhood life in Australia to her days as a single mother in the political and cultural maelstrom of 1960s London. Here her book becomes not just autobiography but also a cultural history of radical movements and the change they created. Written clearly with personal stories from other women, Segals book is a timely reminder of how simply complicated social activism can be.