This paper is an attempt to analyse formulations of the concept of femininity in the work of three authors in the realm of psychoanalysis: Monique Schneider, Joel Birman and Monique David-Ménard. It aims at building up a new territory to think new forms of subjectivation in contemporary culture. Its main topics are: a critical approach to the centrality of the Oedipus and castration complex in the psychoanalytic theory; a new approach to the idea of erogenous body, with the objective of laying a metapsychological basis to the idea of "pulsional excess"; the suggestion to think subjectivation from an ethical and aesthetical point of view. It starts with a critique of the dominant psychoanalytic interpretation of the theory of sexual difference - the phallus-castrated model - in the light of the changes in sexuality in the last 50 years.
Femininity; sexual difference; sexuality; psychoanalysis; culture