'This swirling of images': an interview with Drucilla Cornell

Authors

Ika Willis, University of BristolFollow
Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University

RIS ID

78958

Publication Details

Willis, I. and Cornell, D. (2002). 'This swirling of images': an interview with Drucilla Cornell. Parallax, 8 (4), 86-93.

Abstract

What follows is the transcript of an interview conducted by email between Drucilla Cornell and Ika Willis.

Ika Willis: In your work, you are careful to attend to the fundamental importance of gender identity to individuation in psychoanalytic theory. At the same time, you insist that ‘as a moral and political matter, women must be left free’. It seems that there is both a deep interrelation and a disjunction between the psychoanalytic account of gender identity and the philosophical (moral-political) ideal of freedom in your theory, and that much of the energy and force of your work proceeds from the ways in which each discourse’s account of sex inflects the other’s. Would you agree with this, and in what ways have you found the tension between psychoanalytic and legal-political discourse to be itself productive of new ways of thinking about sex and identity?