double bind


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double bind

 [dŭ´b'l bīnd´]
a type of paradoxical communication or interaction in which one person demands a response to a message that contains mutually contradictory signals (verbal or nonverbal). The other person is unable to comment on the incongruity or to escape the situation.

dou·ble bind

a type of personal interaction in which one receives two mutually conflicting verbal or nonverbal instructions or demands from the same person or different people, resulting in a situation in which either compliance or noncompliance with either alternative threatens one of the needed relationships.

double bind

n.
A psychological impasse created when a person perceives that someone in a position of power is making contradictory demands, so that no response is appropriate.

double bind

[bīnd]
Etymology: L, duplus, double; AS, bindan, to bind
a "no win" situation resulting from two conflicting messages from a person who is crucial to one's survival, such as a verbal message that differs from a nonverbal message. An example is the insistence of a mother that she is not angry about a child's behavior although she is perceived as being obviously angry and hostile.
A situation in which option A and its alternative, option B, both have considerable disadvantages
Psychiatry An interpersonal dilemma in which a person is presented with mutually contradictory messages by another person, usually one who is respected by, or who has authority over, the person receiving the ‘mixed message’
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References in periodicals archive ?
The double bind to which I refer, here, maintains that White privilege pedagogies are complicit in securing and maintaining some of the very privileges enjoyed by Whites.
Critiquing Un/Critical Pedagogies to Move Toward a Pedagogy of Responsibility in Teacher Education
Francophony is a labyrinth of double binds, an enabling violation, a distancing from the oral and the originary.
Assia djebar: in memoriam
The Domdentity is an example of a masculine double bind, where men must simultaneously demonstrate traditional characteristics of masculinity while still showing sensitivity to their submissive wives.
"A view from the top": crafting the male "Domdentity" in domestic discipline relationships
There are some men and women who, well aware of the double bind, use it against women leaders and play into it to advance themselves-- playing into the notion that while a man and woman are equally competent and effective, the man is easier to work with than the woman or one woman is more likeable than another woman because she acts in a manner consistent with traditional gender stereotypes.
Channeling your Inner Olivia Pope (part 3): Women leaders and the double bind
It is 'the irreducible element of an aesthetic education' through which we might learn and feel the double bind in all its ambivalence and complexity (Aesthetic Education, p 10).
Cultural theory as mood work
In "Conclusion: Binding Desire," Hagglund returns to Proust, Woolf, Nabokov, Freud, Lacan, Derrida, and issues of binding and desire, in particular in Derrida's Envoies, seeing Derrida as staging "the double bind of survival in his own text and thereby pursu[ing] a version of the literary writing of chronolibido that is at the center of the preceding chapters"(18).
Dying For Time: Proust, Woolf, And Nabokov
If Christy Mahon and Yeats's Cuchulain represent the small measure of play in the double bind, in which one can perform a kind of immanent critique of the manly estate, Farrington, like so many other Gaelo-Catholic Dubliners, surrenders any claim to manliness, even the parodic or self-critical purchase afforded by Revivalist reinscriptions of the heroic ideal.
Manhood cleaved: doubling down in Dublin town
Jamieson's book, Beyond the Double Bind, delineates five common double binds that women face: womb/brain, silence/shame, sameness/ difference, femininity/competence, and aging/invisibility.
Advertising Phuket's nightlife on the internet: a case study of double binds and hegemonic masculinity in sex tourism
It is not acceptable for the NGRC to ignore the trainer's legal responsibility to protect his or her dogs and leave the trainer in a double bind.
Letter: NGRC rule must be changed
Young women and men brought up in a culture that flaunts sex constantly but won't teach them anything about its realities are in what Gregory Bateson famously called a double bind.
Pornography as propaganda
Kipp makes legible the ideological work of incest in this play, deriving from it what could be called the gothic maternal double bind.
Julie Kipp. Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic
These texts emphasize that the corporeal imagery cannot figure the unspeakable loss as such, but only the double bind from which the narrator is unable to escape.
Bodily detours: Sarah Kofman's narratives of childhood trauma

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