On Gender as Soft Assembly

“Harris challenges her readers to engage in their own thinking with the detailed information she provides on developmental theories, chaos theory, gender development, psycholinguistics, attachment theory and developmental psycholinguistics.”

“Harris explains that she was trained in her early professional life as a developmental psychologist who was never taught to think of development in terms of linear, unfolding structures but rather in terms of functional and dynamically transformational processes.”

“In her training, “structure and the more straightforward descriptions of stages took a back seat” (p. 3) with process, self-organization and transformation taking a front-seat.”

“Harris announces her plan of marrying chaos theory with relational theory and thinks of it as “a marriage made in heaven” because the former privileges “open systems, self-organization and dynamic processes” (p. 5) while the later emphasizes analytic work in “a set of relational matrices of intense mutual though asymmetric” processes.”

“Gender can thus function as a kind of attractor, a point of convergence of interrelated historical, cultural, familial and intrapsychic strands rather than operate as a given, predestined biological identity.”

“Defining gender as an emergent, convergent system allows Harris to look at clinical case histories from a “kaleidoscopic,” moment-to-moment perspective rather than from of a “monarchial” top-down, judgmental position.”

“Qualities that have been traditionally considered to be strictly feminine or masculine can now be re-written through the relational/chaos theory lens as properties emerging out of particular inter-and intrapsychic experiences in collaboration with distinct socio-cultural constellations.”

“It is interesting to note that similar endeavors have occurred in fields closely related to psychoanalytic theory. Michael Andre Bernstein’s concept of sideshadowing, which he develops in Foregone Conclusions (1994), also attempts to address the kind of global, monolithic literary thinking which privileges the literary unidimensional technique of foreshadowing, where the present is already always a “harbinger of an already determined future.””

“In a search of coherence, individuals tend to want to make sense of their history by looking backwards, using incidents from the past as luminous explanations of their pre-ordained present.”

“In contrast to foreshadowing, Bernstein suggests sideshadowing as an alternative narrative technique, one that is less dismissive of variety and more responsive to the unpredictability of everyday life.”

“Instead of seeing the present as an already pre-ordained future, sideshadowing permits one to regard the present as being “dense with multiple and mutually exclusive possibilities for what is to come”(p. 1). Sideshadowing, Bernstein writes, champions the incommensurability of the concrete moment and refuses the tyranny of all synthetic master schemes.”

“Structural theory can certainly become too rigid and monolithic, losing sight of the particular detail, but post-modern reasoning can also become too porous and all encompassing and thus risk losing its explanatory force. I think Harris’s sophisticated study of Gender as Soft Assembly offers a timely response to these competing powerful theoretical currents.”