“A case of homosexuality in a woman”, revisited

The chapter starts with the revision of Freud’s work about the young homosexual, in which Freud posed hypotheses about female sexuality that he had begun developing in 1895. The Victorian conceptions, the Oedipus, the binary male/female construction, the phallic/castrated construction, brought Freud to an impasse in his understanding of the feminine. With his ever-present intellectual honesty, Freud recognized that impasse. Using this example, Braun concludes that today, femininity must be reconsidered from the new paradigms of sex and gender, plural logics, and complex epistemologies.