Institute of Historical Research

When is the past in Female Sexual Dysfunction?

Katherine Angel

(Kingston University)

In this talk I will reflect on an increasing convergence between recent changes in the classification of women's sexual problems in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (the DSM), and feminist critiques of that DSM. Both have tended towards a naturalization of low desire in women; in the manual, an erasure of a diagnosis of low desire in women has taken place, reflecting a sense of low desire as definitional in women. I will draw out what these phenomena, and the emphasis in the manual on female sexuality as responsive, might tell us about how the pasts of both psychiatry and feminism are conceived with the contemporary debate, paying particular attention to the fraught status of unconscious symptoms as well as anxieties the sexualisation of culture.

History of Sexuality seminar series