Circumcision on the Couch: The Cultural, Psychological, and Gendered Dimensions of the World's Oldest Surgery

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An Independent Book of the Month Penises, and the things people do with them, have been subjects of controversy for a long time. This book examines how one thing that some people do to penisesremove the foreskinhas become a site upon which vital questions of gender, race, religion, sexuality, and psychic life are negotiated. While most contemporary work on the subject is concerned with whether circumcision is right or wrong, safe or harmful, Circumcision on the Couch takes as its starting point that the significance of male circumcision exceeds anatomical and juridical considerations. Deploying a feminist Lacanian framework, while drawing from a wide range of archival sources and critical thought, Jordan Osserman asks: How can psychoanalysis help us shed light on the ideologies, discourses, and fantasies surrounding circumcision and the impassioned stances for and against it And how might the history of circumcision, in turn, allow us to re-assess and clarify how we understand the split (or snipped) subject of psychoanalysis

Reviews

During a time when men, especially white men, are a category put into serious question, let us take the unlikely route of the foreskin question, towards all that psychoanalysis has to say about the penis and cutting it, or not. Ossermans book takes us through this murky ground in ways serious, and seriously funny, towards what we might call a 'circumcision of the heart,' where we know ourselves as simply human, and not a god with and among men. * Jamieson Webster, author of Conversion Disorder and The Hamlet Doctrine *
Jordan Ossermans Circumcision on the Couch: The Cultural, Psychological, and Gendered Dimensions of the World's Oldest Surgery provides the critical reader with a critical analysis of the role that infant male circumcision played (and plays) in Western theories of the social sciences and the humanities over the past one hundred plus years. Rooted in the examination of psychoanalytic debates about the practice and its implication for the participants in the debates, this insightful and productive approach shows how these theories evolve, reproduce, and refashion themselves in worlds where notions of masculinity, bodily integrity, gender, and race/ethnicity are seemingly transitional categories. Well worth the read! * Sander L. Gilman, author of Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture *
Jordan Ossermans Circumcision on the Couch is the first, expansive psychoanalytic analysis of a medical procedure that carries enormous historical and culture weight, as well as the ability to ignite passionate debate. The brilliance of the book is not only its lucid and succinct survey of centuries of theological, medical, cultural, and political controversies over circumcision but its presentation of these arguments and the enormous tensions among them with nuance, sensitivity, and compassion. * Michael Bronski, Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media, Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality, Harvard University, USA, and author of A Queer History of the United States *

Author Bio

Jordan Osserman is Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck (University of London), UK, and a clinical trainee with the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, London.