The Fragile Phallus -A conference about the precarious nature of masculinity in the modern world. Jordan Osserman

Jordan Osserman
Is the Phallus Uncut? On Male Circumcision and ‘Intactivism’
Female circumcision (also known as ‘FGM’) has been debated and opposed by feminists, policymakers, and the public at large for a long time. More recently, a movement opposed to male circumcision, which goes under the banner of ‘intactivism’, has been gathering steam. Based initially in the United States, many intactivists are men who were circumcised at birth and now attribute a range of psychological and sexual ailments to the procedure. They often portray themselves as victims of feminist ideology, aligning themselves with the ‘men’s rights movement’. Some attempt ‘foreskin restoration’ to retrieve, or regrow, the part of their penis they feel to have traumatically lost.
The term ‘intactivist’ invites psychoanalytic criticism, as it references that wish for ‘intactness’ that psychoanalysis alleges to be a defensive fantasy against the subject’s foundational fracture — the wish to ‘restore’ a prelapsarian wholeness that never actually existed. How can psychoanalysis help us understand the psychical dimensions of such stances on male circumcision? And what might the seemingly fringe concerns of intactivists reveal about the nature of masculinity as such?

Jordan Osserman completed his PhD in Gender Studies and Psychoanalysis at University College in London in 2017. His dissertation, entitled ‘On the Foreskin Question’, drew on psychoanalysis and philosophy to examine the surprisingly pivotal role of stances towards male circumcision in Christianity, medicine, and politics. His work has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly and Blunderbuss Magazine, and he is a host on the podcast New Books in Psychoanalysis.

The latest string of sexual assault and harassment scandals invites critical reflection into the structure of masculinity.

While much of the media focus has been on abuses of power, popular responses such as the #MeToo movement have emphasised the everydayness of sexual harassment, shifting the focus to masculinity as such.

Psychoanalysis has long held that masculinity is not a biological given, nor is it simply the sum total of patriarchal values operating on an individual. Rather, it is characterised by a peculiar, fraught and anxious relation to the psychical emblem of the ‘phallus’.

How might psychoanalysis enrich popular notions of ‘fragile’ and ‘toxic’ masculinity?

This conference brings together perspectives from psychoanalysis and beyond to bring out some of these troubling (and troubled) dimensions of the subjective structure popularly known as ‘masculinity’.