Gender in Psychoanalysis: The Return of the Critique of Knowledge (Part 1)

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What Does Gender Do to Psychoanalysis? (Part 2)

Carnets de l’École de Psychanalyse Sigmund Freud, n°93, 2014, p. 59-72.

 

We are going to address what deserves to be called a topical subject.

Given the difficulty of dealing with gender, I have chosen to retrace with you the historical thread of its irresistible rise since approximately the mid-20th century.

Everything I am going to discuss today is based on research conducted notably within the framework of university work—this is an important first clarification—but above all, on a clinical experience from which I have extracted two main lines of work designated by “the trans question” on one side and “the gay question” on the other, — all against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic — which is the second necessary clarification to formulate for you before going further. “Trans” and “gay” are to be understood as identity signifiers, to which gender brings us back and which it allows us to think about, and with them the question of identities in their current context.

The prevailing common idea is to define gender as that which pertains to the masculine and the feminine; this is, moreover, what a large part of the social sciences favors as an approach, to the detriment of what gender is for many others.

The gender I am going to talk about is therefore not that of grammar, nor that which passes for “social sex,” as it is very often defined.

This is because gender, since it began to circulate, has been covered by a good dozen different conceptions: sociological, philosophical, feminist, Marxist, genetic, political, psychiatric, minority, queer, heterocentered, gay, lesbian, trans, and others still.

While I thought some time ago that a discussion on gender in psychoanalysis required an introduction by a whole host of preliminary considerations to facilitate the approach, I am now sure of one thing: everyone is perfectly immersed, whether they like it or not, in the debate on “gender” and in the current mythological theory that now accompanies it.

This does not prevent the fact that almost no one knows what they are talking about when they talk about gender. Many are certain they know, when they claim or defend it; most voluntarily forget that gender is first and foremost an indefinable thing that troubles and disturbs categories, and that this incompatibility with the effort of conceptualization is not a flaw, but its main quality.

This allows us to think very reasonably that there is no need to know what it is to benefit from what it does.

Nevertheless, it is not forbidden to welcome it, and if we cannot give it a stable definition, we can describe its theoretical coordinates based on clinical experience.

In the media and political mess of this past year, from the time the “marriage for all” bill was put up for debate — undoubtedly in the worst possible way — to the beginnings of the debate on the family law reform project (finally postponed for at least a year under pressure from fundamentalists) — and in particular questions related to abortion and ART — gender has been used in every possible way. I cannot say it better than by using this culinary expression that illustrates the concoction in which the media, politicians, community activists, psychoanalysts, religious figures, a few paranoiacs, and other neo-Nazis participate. Which of them is capable of watching the cooking of this pot to prevent it from boiling over?

All this mess is both the worst time to try to see clearly about gender, but also the best. Everything is there. In the open. One only has to listen — or open the windows on demonstration days — to see in the flesh what gender produces as effects, what it reveals, what it is, and what it allows us to think about psychoanalytic theory and practice. “Gender trouble” — according to the established expression — is clearly at work; it is having its effect.

In an interview published this month in the journal Vacarme, Joan Scott looks back on her career as a researcher and her encounter with gender. In passing, she gives a definition close to those — in the plural — to which I initially refer, before proposing my own in turn. She reminds us that gender is first and foremost a means of discussing the manifest and hidden meaning of the links between biological attributions and social roles, of questioning the naturalness and historicity of sex. Namely, that there is nothing “natural” about a male human being becoming a man and holding more power than a woman, for example, and something that is often forgotten today, that there have not always been two sexes for medical and scientific knowledge (until the 18th century) and that the supposed difference between the sexes has not always been so firmly indexed in discourse to the number two — this should be discussed from the point of view of language. Since 1983, Joan Scott has thus defined gender as a “tool for historical critical analysis.” This is undoubtedly the most interesting definition for psychoanalysts among those in circulation, the closest to what psychoanalysts can do with gender.

This is certainly not the first modern conception of gender, since we owe it to John Money in 1953 and Robert Stoller in 1964 for having defined gender and gender identity — then the core of gender identity — based on work on intersexuality and transsexualism. Stoller’s conception, inspired by Money’s, remains to this day the majority reference among “shrinks” regarding gender. It is, however, not the most interesting in terms of conceptual elaboration and clinical handling. To this is now added the fact that their propositions have since been put through the mill of feminist, queer, postmodern, and trans thoughts, which have largely changed the situation over the last thirty years.

Money and Stoller have a very adaptive approach to gender, reifying in their propositions its dimension of social and cultural learning, emphasizing the constraint that the determinants in question exert on the psyche or the psychological: with them, gender is not a psychic creativity that could have an influence on the social, but a social adaptation of the psyche invited to conform under the effect of interaction.

In 1953, Money defined gender identity as follows: “gender identity is the intimate experience of sexual identity, and sexual identity is the public expression of gender identity.” This is, in my view, one of the most interesting definitions.

Following Money, Stoller would rethink gender identity by giving it a “core of gender identity,” acquired in the early stages of life, which gives gender an evolutionary turn that does not take into account the circularity induced in Money’s work between the individual and the collective.

Their work largely inspired and supported the developments of gender in the discourse of materialist feminism of the 1970s. The social perspective of sex determined by cultural learning became established. In 1972, Ann Oakley inaugurated in her work Sex, Gender and Society what has since been considered the study of social relations between the sexes (In France, we refer to Danièle Kergoat, Christine Delphy, or Nicole-Claude Mathieu, for example). At that time, gender was thought of in a way that we can summarize with the following formula: “Gender creates sex.”

But this cannot be grasped without retracing the historical thread of the dangerous liaisons of sex and gender since the beginning of the 20th century. I propose to scatter here and there a few formulas that we will then summarize. These sentences are taken out of context; they no longer mean much, but they continue to say enough to have left a mark on people’s minds.

First, there is Sigmund Freud’s, “Anatomy is destiny” (Freud, 1924). In writing this, he is not considering gender, but precedes the psychological consequences of anatomical difference (Freud, 1925) of which he would speak later.

Then in 1949, we can recall Simone de Beauvoir’s famous phrase, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

The theoretical developments that followed these years 1950-1960 are mostly part of sociological thought; they already shared almost nothing — at least in appearance — with psychoanalytic theories, except for a few points of opposition. This divide between psychoanalytic theories and what would become modern feminism of the 1970s seems to have been established in the 1950s-1960s, which were also a historical turning point in the history of the French and global psychoanalytic movement. And it is also the moment when so-called postmodern philosophy developed, again in France.

Postmodern French philosophical thought, read in the United States by Americans — then constituted by authors such as Deleuze, Derrida, but also Lacan — became in the 1960s what has since been called French Theory.

At the same time, these thinkers, critical of the system of knowledge, were, without being directly involved, among the sources of what was called in English universities Cultural Studies — an “anti-discipline” of the 1960s, strongly critical, presenting itself as anti-academic, and providing a transversal approach to popular, protest, and minority cultures.

In 1970-1971, Lacan stated, “The woman does not exist.”

As early as 1970, Cultural Studies were imported to the United States, where they intersected with French Theory. This occurred at the moment when Lesbian and Gay Studies were also being established — though not without links — notably at the University of San Francisco (which opened the first undergraduate course dedicated to LGBTQ Studies as early as 1970; NYU opened the first university post-graduate degree in 1986). During this period, a profusion of knowledge ordinarily perceived as minority became established as official knowledge. They reconfigured the landscape of university knowledge and gained their credentials under the influence of a thought nourished by deconstruction: the deconstruction of knowledge by the philosophical thought of deconstruction, by the experience of the unconscious, and by a critical thought of dominations of all kinds.

Academicism was challenged in the United States, in universities, under the effect of a thought breaking with its own sources, set free to explore a new territory where its precursors themselves no longer recognized their own, where all new paradigms were regularly ransacked to open new perspectives at every turn to the critical knowledge of knowledge and its own constitution. The notions of “situated-knowledges” of the feminism of the time appeared, and since then, for example, the thought of intersectionality — sex, race, class — permeated by 3rd generation feminism — that of Black Feminists 20 years ago, and that of Chicanas immigrated to the United States today, which we can follow today with current trans-feminism — that originating from transgender or transsexual feminists.

In 1975, Gayle Rubin wrote in her work The Traffic in Women: “psychoanalysis is a failed feminist theory.” To which she added, “Since psychoanalysis is a theory of gender, to discard it would be suicidal for a political movement dedicated to eradicating gender hierarchy (or gender itself).”

Meanwhile, feminist elaborations revolved around “gender creates sex.”

“Gender studies” did not yet exist as such, but the first works that would soon expand into a corpus had already begun: those critiquing male domination are the most famous.

While the term gender was used in the United States, in France during the same period, we preferred, notably under the influence of Lévi-Strauss, to speak of sexual differences. This is what would further accentuate this return effect that we have seen taking place for about thirty years under the guise of gender or gender.

This is what happened between the 1960s and 1980s between France, Great Britain, and the United States, around Cultural Studies, French Theory, and LGBT and Queer Studies, in which we can find the historical threads or read the effects of the thoughts that nurtured these movements: philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and others.

All these turns and recompositions — these knottings and unknottings — took place in the same period; it is not a coincidence. Elements had to separate in order to articulate or knot with others. We regularly lose sight of this aspect of this moment of separation-configuration, which nevertheless explains certain transformations. If psychoanalysis seems to be severely shunned by feminist discourse from the 1960s-1970s, and even more so since then by queer theories, we must look at this more closely. We cannot be satisfied with this supposed resistance to psychoanalysis, which we too often use to explain that emerging social or thought movements seem to want to know nothing of the unconscious — implying thereby that we can do nothing about it.

Beyond this vast critique of knowledge as a method and experience shared with psychoanalysis and philosophy in particular, let us note that the knowledges concerned by these intellectual movements are linked to sexualities — as practices and beyond, in their social, cultural, political, and psychological resonances. These are minority questions originating from sexual minorities that emerge with Cultural Studies, with Queer and Gender Studies, whether they come from the female minority, lesbians, gays, transsexuals, blacks, or immigrants.

We have not seen Patriarch Studies or Good Fathers Studies appear in universities. Why? Because these theories are taught by default, in the shadow of knowledge — that is the critical point of view. Because the knowledge that these names could cover is taught in ignorance of itself, which on one hand feminists can fight, and which on the other hand psychoanalysts can hear when, in both cases, the ignorance of this knowledge to be criticized ends up becoming a symptom, psychically or socially.

I hypothesize that this return, or this extension, of this critical experience of knowledge is directly derived from the knowledge of the sexual brought to light by psychoanalysis. If, through psychoanalysis, the knowledge of the sexual, which it helped to bring forth, had not spread in effects of knowledge, perhaps we would not have seen all these critical movements for the liberation of sexual minorities expand.

These theoretical and practical movements are often determined against psychoanalysis, perceived as conservative. Almost all are supported by the experience of psychoanalysis, while maintaining a severe critique against it. The most recognized theorists of Queer or Gender Theory have often claimed their personal experience of psychoanalysis (Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, Joan Scott).

When Rubin established psychoanalysis as a “failed feminism” in The Traffic in Women in 1975, she permanently inscribed the Freudian sexual into the array of queer and feminist theories that would follow. But the developments of these theories take place far from the couches for the vast majority of those who study and extend these thoughts: the 1970s eventually gave way to the 1980s and 1990s, and psychoanalysis was no longer perceived as a thought and practice of sexual emancipation.

The feminist critiques of psychoanalysis by Gayle Rubin or Monique Wittig participate in a movement of depreciation of historical psychoanalysis, while at the same time the knowledge of the sexual constitutes a historical element of the deployment of these critical thoughts, without there being a need to notice it, so much so that we no longer pay attention to it. We do not see that the social and cultural emancipation of sexualities placed in the minority is also supported by the liberation of knowledge about the sexual that psychoanalysis sparked, not as a theoretical corpus or movement of thought, but as a singular experience of some of the most famous theorists of these postmodern currents.

In 1978, Wittig wrote, “Lesbians are not women.” Explaining thereby that lesbians escape the economic, political, and social sexual categories that are man and woman. Even if her formula is related to that of De Beauvoir, we can also read it alongside that of Lacan.

In 1992, Judith Butler published her famous Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. She argues that if gender can be undone, it is because it is a doing, and that sex, consequently, is also a doing, a doing linked to the doing of gender, and to the undoing of gender which reopens the perspective of a possible doing of sex. What then prevails is translated into the following formula: “Undoing gender, undoing sex.”

The setting in motion of the doing and undoing of gender coincided with the arrival in France of queer, as a thought and as a movement. The queer movement in the United States is certainly not the one that has colonized universities the most, as Gender studies and Cultural Studies have done, but the latter are not without a direct link to queer thought.

Contrary to or beyond what E. Roudinesco said earlier this week in the Huffington Post, queer is not a subgroup or a small minority group, but much more an experience of questioning the boundaries of the strange and the uncanny that is not defined by academic teachings nor summarized by the existence of a social group. Queer is nothing more or less than the name of the recent form that the Freudian uncanny applied to the sexual can take in our modernity, when the sexual comes to be represented in the social. Queer is a thought of strangeness that cannot be assimilated to established knowledge, nor to any identity, since queer is beyond identities and is based on the return to the surface of conflicts and horrors buried out of sight by identities when they are based on repression. Queer is the possibility of this return assumed by those who do not want to cover it up again too quickly. Queer is not assimilable to gender or its history; it is the abject in Jean Genet or the impossible homosexual in Lee Edelman.

During these years 1990-2000, the so-called gay movement reached its identity peak; people spoke of the homosexual community or gay community, which included both gay men and lesbian women, as well as transsexual people, although the latter did not have a place in the community title, at least not immediately.

Gradually, the L for lesbians was attached to the G for gays. A feminist consideration of the situation of homosexual women materialized, for example, in the renaming of the annual homosexual pride march — the pride — to Lesbian and Gay Pride.

A new trans discourse then emerged, made possible by trans people taking freedom beyond the assignment of places in discourse that identity movements had reserved for them. The edges of queer proved unstable in welcoming trans diversity and the fundamental questions that trans people activate. I say trans to adopt the way in which those who would have been designated as transsexuals before began to circulate new signifiers: trans (2004-2005), transgender, in particular. I say at the edges of queer, because it is at the margin of the margin, as always, that the most interesting things have appeared and continue to emerge, those capable of informing us about the sometimes discreet pathologies of the norm.

At the beginning of this 3rd millennium, the signifier transpedegouines also appeared, testifying to a questioning of the LGBT acronym, which had meanwhile become the official abbreviation to represent the diversity of the different sexual minorities composing the homosexual community of yesteryear, which had become different from itself, and within which oppressions are exercised between different power positions: gay, lesbian, bi, and trans are not on equal footing in this community fiction. LGBT, let us note, appeared under the influence of the necessities of political advocacy discourse.

During this recent period, the Q for queer joined LGBT, as some eventually claimed it as an identity in its own right, even if it meant contradicting its initial meaning, to give LGBTQ, to which the I for intersex is added today, the very latest arrivals in what can no longer be thought of as “the homosexual community,” but “the LGBTQI community.”

Identities are severely questioned, crushed behind the small letters charged with representing them, reduced to very little alongside the subjects themselves constrained by this acronymic dictatorship. But perhaps identities are reified by these letters, and not just reduced? What consequences can this have on subjects? What does this singular example teach us about the evolution of sexual identity in the era of gender?

If we continue with these elements in this direction, sexual orientation clearly no longer has much meaning. Since, by definition, the conjunction of letters makes a common lot of what we would have designated in other times as homosexuality or heterosexuality or bisexuality or transsexuality, designating in turn choices, preferences, non-choices, or effects of choice.

But now, this no longer holds; the Ts are just as much homo or hetero, as their partners can be, whether they are G, B, Q, I, or H, for it is appropriate to add the H for Hetero who can be partners with Gs, Bs, Ls, Ts, Qs, Is, or finally other Hs. Nothing more seems to be missing from the LGBTQIH roll call. But only in appearance.

For indeed, that there is the strange, the bizarre, and the homosexual is maintained, it seems, in this identity convergence, but without being represented in previously known forms. What could be observed and thought through the prism of notions such as sexual orientation or sexual identity has broken free thanks to the effect of gender, by becoming plural genders, both situated in an identity field but released from a strict assignment of sex or predetermined sexual preference, exercising the possibility of a transformation of the living conditions of the subject caught in a discourse.

The “homosexual” in common could be replaced by bizarre or queer or minority. The social marginality of certain sexual minorities is no longer that of the inverts or perverts described in the last century, but it is the marginality of those organized by a draconian identity discourse when it takes over from the old pathologizing discourses of psychiatry or even psychoanalysis. So either the camp of perverts has normalized, or it is perversion that has abandoned sexual minorities.

The marginality that gender highlights is that of the identity vulnerability of an era where certain transformations of the relationships between the signifier and the performative have perhaps proven that identities are processes in their own right and no longer just the productions of identificatory processes: they have gained their autonomy, which is not without effects of subjective liberation and restriction.

Thus, that there is still sexual orientation, homosexuality, or heterosexuality, or coherent bisexuality seems belied by the LGBTQI designation itself. What federates is no longer, obviously, the supposed meaning of a sexual preference. The minority factor seems much more to be the organizing principle of this amalgam. This is very enlightening on what gender allows when it favors a quasi-permanent reconfiguration of the identity veneer and therefore a relaunch of identifications, in particular those of so-called sexual identities supposed to be stable and identifiable.

So much so that since the 2000s, under the influence of trans people not always satisfied with the amalgamated T, another consideration of sex and gender has begun to establish itself under the formula “my sex is not my gender.” The sex in question here is no longer the sex of materialist feminism nor even that of the “undoing gender, undoing sex” of Gender Theory.

The gender in question today in “my sex is not my gender” is not the gender of the 1970s. And the sex in question from now on is not biological sex, but a new sex, a sex undone by gender itself undone, and created anew, created as a novelty in its own right, a new sex — as I designate it — which would no longer be entirely ignorant of its non-naturalness, of its non-historicity except that of subjective history, a sex enlightened on its knotting with gender and its sexual non-omnipotence, a sex aware of its sexual incompetence and its gender determination: a kind of a-sex made possible by gender when it undoes sex.

It is this sex that the clinical practice of gender in psychoanalysis offers us to approach, first to understand its constructions, then to explore it in the different handlings it makes possible in clinical work, in analytical constructions, and the renewed and sometimes even new interpretations it favors, which allow us not to retreat too much before these new sexual figures that have not finished destabilizing us under the effect of the knowledge of the sexual that we receive in this movement of return.

So to conclude the list of this historical evolution of notions and concepts, and by emphasizing again the underlying dynamic that I have qualified as being a return of the critique of knowledge, I finally proposed at the end of my research — which is only beginning — this one: “gender undoes sex and creates sex,” where we can appreciate that the repetition of sex implies that it is not the same one, and that some possible reformulations of the goal of analysis in the light of gender open up here, the description of a possible sexual creation that the treatment could aim for with the adjustment of sexuation of which gender is the vector, towards the creation of the new sex.

Part 2 of the intervention

What does gender do to psychoanalysis, and what can psychoanalysis do with it? (Three notions revisited, and some excerpts relating to practice).

Gender is not necessary for psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis has already developed a whole theoretical corpus, which undeniably allows us to think about the sexual, to work with the Freudian sexual, which is, let us not forget, the best currently available way to think about matters of sex and sexuality.

To this, gender adds nothing, a priori, except that it is a good means — the most current — to resume the examination of certain notions that are not at all psychoanalytic, but which have nevertheless enjoyed undeniable success in the discourse of psychoanalysts, in their writings, to the point that they can often be perceived as psychoanalytic concepts. Among them, let us note “sexual difference,” “sexual orientation,” or even “homosexuality.” Let us add to this that gender allows us to reconsider the relationship that psychoanalysis maintains with other notions such as that of “identity.”

After some time of research, I ended up giving gender the following definition: Gender is the limit situated both outside and inside sex, the shoreline or the margin of sex capable of revealing its depth of field. Gender appears under the effect of the sexual; it questions the unconscious knowledges of sexual difference, and causes identifications to waver until their renewal. Thus, gender undoes sex and creates sex in the in-between of its intermittent trouble, at the moment of stability where it experiences itself.

In this definition, sex and gender are neither opposed nor complementary, but knotted together; it is as a knotting that they seemed to me to be able to be approached in the attempts at elaboration based on experience.

This conception contrasts quite sharply with the classic distinctions we find and which I spoke about earlier. I could summarize this by insisting on the fact that this knotting imposed itself in the clinic, and that it is a contribution that I situate as being that of trans people — not transsexuals or transgenders, but indeed trans people, as the signifier trans has gradually imposed itself in discourse. Trans is not the in-between of man and woman, nor is it the third sex. Trans reveals a place, a third place which, when considered, reveals a three-way knotting of man-woman-trans. This is what trans people have taught me. And this is how, thanks to them, I found myself on the path of the formulas of sexuation and Borromean clinic, which I thought I could avoid at the start, hoping to be satisfied with a quick and easy conceptual facelift. I finally could not escape the implants.

This definition imposed itself to respond, in particular, to the need to account for gender beyond the masculine/feminine conception often given to it, which proves to be very insufficient or even counterproductive.

Gender, in the perspective I am considering, is useful if it allows us to maintain this tension toward the deepening of sexual difference and the knowledges extracted from it. Gender is useful to us in psychoanalysis if it serves as an operator capable of maintaining trouble, an experience of trouble that brings us back and exposes us to the experience of sexual difference as it never ceases to occur, although what we manufacture from it as knowledges (as sexual identity and other psychic constructions still) allow us to no longer see it at work or to experience it too much.

Applied to clinical experience, this definition and this conception of gender allow, in my view, to consider both gender and sex as the two unknowns of an insoluble equation: the equation of the enigma of the sexual represented by sexuality (which allows us, in passing, to move forward on a kind of conception of sexuality in psychoanalysis). This perspective implies not presuming anything about what gender and sex might mean or represent, and attempting to give them a new life.

To move forward in my work, I had to choose a method. And to not complicate the task too much, I adopted, as much as possible, the Freudian method. Thus, I chose to observe gender and sex — these two unknowns — through the topographical, economic, and dynamic triptych that Freud left us. In doing so, gender and sex began to take on forms and meanings in terms of object, process, and agency.

A table brings together these coordinates, specifying that it is not definitive at this stage and requires verification in some respects. This table is a second way of defining or situating gender in relation to sex and the sexual, from a metapsychological and perhaps Borromean perspective.

So what is gender in psychoanalysis for?

The difference between the sexes

Gender is first useful to the other, and moreover gender is always first the gender of the other. It reminds us that the sexual is always already inhabited by the other, beginning with oneself. This is something I learned recently, since the thesis was defended and awarded a prize in gender studies. On several occasions, readers of this thesis told me: “What you discuss about gender is interesting, but it is very much gay gender,” others told me: “What you discuss about gender is interesting, but it is very much trans gender.” Need I specify that the first quotation comes from a presumably heterosexual or straight interlocutor, and that the second comes from a presumably homosexual or gay interlocutor? I can complete this anecdote by telling you that a trans friend once told me, in the same vein, “that’s just like your gender, at least it reminds gay people that we—trans people—don’t just dream of sleeping with heterosexuals, we do it, and why? Because gender doesn’t scare us, we invented it.”

This anecdote reveals that gender revives the singular and subjective experience of having to situate oneself and situate the other in the sexual landscape. When gender emerges or is discussed (which we are going to do here), each person unfortunately draws closer to this experience of sexual difference that is constantly at work, but which one manages to avoid head-on thanks to the knowledge we construct to “face” it, as we say. Of this knowledge necessary to confront sexual difference at work, gender particularly highlights what we call “the difference between the sexes,” forgetting that this “difference between the sexes” does not pre-exist the sexes of which it nevertheless establishes a kind of relationship, forgetting too quickly that we construct it precisely to make this incessant experience of sexual difference comfortable, which does not presage the number of sexes to be found there, but which we attempt to maintain as two, undoubtedly to make our task easier.

Gender revives this work of inventorying the knowledge necessary for us to face sexual difference, between infantile theories, beliefs, imaginary knowledge, scientific knowledge, etc. The difference between the sexes is not a psychoanalytic notion or concept, yet it is commonly invoked by psychoanalysts’ discourse about sexuality (sexuality which has still not found a definition or conception in the field of psychoanalysis). That the two of the two sexes has imposed itself for so long to the point that it deduces itself from being quite tenacious to the psyche does not mean that it is not the result of something. Is it the product of a psychic operation, or the effect of a structure such as that of language? Is it the two of a two sexes in the unconscious? This is not a priori what the formulas of sexuation allow us to deduce, according to my reading of them. So how can we explain that this famous “difference between the sexes” is so present, and preferred to “sexual differences—in the plural”? Perhaps it testifies to theoretical necessity as fiction, perhaps this “difference between the sexes” fills in for the moment a place of knowledge where something still escapes us too violently for us to confront it more calmly. But I cannot say between what and what “the difference between the sexes” acts as a barrier or stopper by making us believe that we know something with it, unlike “sexual orientation” which I will now discuss, which establishes itself, in my view, at the site of a fictive articulation between sexuation and object choice.

Sexual orientation

Another example. I already discussed this in my first part, it is “sexual orientation” as a non-psychoanalytic notion still, but so commonly accepted that we can also suppose that it sometimes influences psychoanalysts’ thinking, and perhaps their work. The idea of sexual orientation is not confused with the question of object choice, it does not substitute for it but sometimes seems to extend or cover it. Regarding it, gender makes us feel that despite ourselves, we are also influenced by the idea of sexual orientation and not only guided by the psychoanalytic notion of object choice. We sometimes believe, more than we admit, in homosexuality or heterosexuality or bisexuality as if they existed. And this persists, even though the sexual orientations linked to them seem to have been transformed in recent decades, under the influence of identities, to the point of no longer being either recognizable or conceivable with previously acquired reference points; have we taken the measure of this?

Let us think, for example, of the case of Marc in my thesis—whom I will discuss again shortly regarding the imaginary handling of gender in practice: this trans boy, this transboy, this trans man questions and handles gender like no one else: he taught me a great deal, in short. He loves girls, women, just as he loved girls and women in the time before his transition. He was before this time a not-yet trans-man who loved women as a woman presumably, so he was a lesbian woman at the time when she was not spoken of as he and man. He was a feminine homosexual and he is today a masculine heterosexual. His object choice has not changed a priori, his sexual orientation has manifestly changed meaning, but also pole, passing from feminine to masculine and from homosexuality to heterosexuality, in other words Marc’s case underlines to what extent sexual orientation literally has no meaning.

From this hypothesis that sexual orientation has no meaning, we can perceive the role we make it play despite ourselves, in theory. To summarize what I have just said very quickly, it seems to me that this non-psychoanalytic notion comes to the rescue of psychoanalytic concepts, and that it is adopted for the comfort it brings. Sexual orientation is a kind of binder between sexuation on one side and object choice on the other. Although there is not, a priori, any necessity to hold together object choice and sexuation which do not deal with the same things at all, it nevertheless remains that in ordinary life, something of the order of consequences of sexuation does indeed articulate with what represents object choice in everyday life, and that we are undoubtedly invited to give meaning to this thanks to this imaginary junction that is sexual orientation—which would thus be an infantile sexual theory. Sexual orientation fills this fiction and distances us from knowledge about the sexual—as unconscious knowledge.

Identity

By revising our habits regarding supposed sexual orientations and the difference between the sexes, we can also reconsider our relationship to the notion of identity.

Identity is not a productive notion in psychoanalysis; we prefer without possible comparison to think of identifications. Certainly, identities do not account in all their truths for the identifications that found them, which is a loss for those interested in mobilizing underlying psychic resources. But identities constitute a pole of narcissistic attractivity which we would be wrong to do without, for thinking and for acting in clinical work.

Let us take gay identity, and see what the specific nature of this minority identity teaches us about the general. Beyond the identity marker, and although it sometimes claims to, gay identity fundamentally says nothing about sexual orientation—since the latter possibly has no meaning. Thus practice teaches us that many homosexuals may not recognize themselves as gay, since the identity marker, which sometimes serves as sexual identity and sometimes as gender identity, allows one to escape it as much as to be pinned by it through discourse. Subjective positioning in the field of social representations agrees more or less with subjective determination.

So why think, as common thinking testifies, that homosexuals are gays, or that gays are homosexuals? Why hold together a gender identity—gay identity—and the fiction of a sexual orientation—making the joint between sexuation and object choice—if not to set aside the impossibility of sexual identity—in the sense of what escapes knowledge about the sexual that identity, whatever it may be, cannot truly represent in the social?

Certain clinical situations require visiting these questions. The phenomenon of slam—intravenous drug consumption in a sexual context, appearing among gay men in the years 2004-2005—is a very good example. Within a so-called sexual community, the one formerly called homosexual, men, mostly HIV-positive, began injecting drugs of a new kind—cathinones—in the context of their sexual life, to the point that this consumption is no longer only a support for sexuality, but a sexual practice in its own right, which the concept of addiction is incapable of illuminating.

How can we grasp that these men, gay for the most part and gay in everyone’s eyes, HIV-positive, found themselves in this sub-community of slammers, quite ready to explore in the smallest corners a drug consumption behavior with rapid and massive deleterious effects?

This phenomenon is an identity symptom, that is my initial hypothesis. These gay HIV-positive men bear the costs of intra-community repression, of an epidemic and its representatives, which the common community attempts to exclude within itself, like the splitting—for Freud—relegating the irreconcilable representation to the formation of a second psychic group where it is consigned to oblivion? In Nancy, Bataille and Blanchot, the community feeds on the death of the individual, so gender becomes, here, our ally to support the subject facing the identity “being-in-common” which sometimes merges with death as communal work.

How to proceed clinically, before this so glaring collusion between an epidemic and an identity, if not by proposing that the signifier gay—marker of the identity in question—be subjected to the effort of deconstruction, to be undone just as gender was previously undone in the recent history of sexual identities—undoing gender, undoing gay?

The deconstruction of gender is a possible access route to opening up sex as an identity representative, without needing to abandon identities on the side, from which we can profit for the work of libidinal mobilization.

Handling of gender in clinical practice – the case of Marc (excerpts from the article “Emergence and handling of gender in clinical practice. From substance to object”).

Marc is 22 years old when we meet for the first time, in the context of a consultation at my office. His initial request, as expressed, concerns his transition journey, for which he wishes to have a space to think and progress in this “sexual journey.” Not being a psychiatrist, this “psy” follow-up cannot be integrated into the mandatory follow-up framework that the official protocol requires in France for this type of support, when hormonal treatment is desired, then surgical operation. But this is not Marc’s wish, who is already taking hormones, on the black market. And above all, he does not wish any surgical operation, so has no “interest” in integrating an official transition follow-up. Marc works; he holds a job in the commercial sector, he is a salesperson. He lives alone in Paris, where he grew up. His income allows him to live comfortably according to him, to ensure the advancement of his “sexual journey” project, and to pay for “psy” sessions. Marc is a trans boy, heterosexual, who loves girls, women or trans women persons, as he specified to me the perimeter of his heterosexuality. He has never seen a “psy” before meeting me. How did he choose me? Because one of his friends, who comes to see me, gave him my address and contact information. We begin the follow-up, at the rate of one interview per week to start.

Very quickly, the question of hormones takes on importance in Marc’s discourse. He has just started this “treatment,” which he names thus although not benefiting from medical prescription or financial coverage of said treatment. His supply is regular, similar to the methods used by certain athletes to obtain testosterone. With medical follow-up and a proper prescription, Marc could benefit from Testogel^® treatment, an ointment. For various reasons, he obtains testosterone to inject intramuscularly, which he applies himself, after taking some advice from a nurse friend.

The first effects of testosterone on the psychological level no longer increase; Marc has generally become accustomed to the novelties of masculine characteristics (increased libido, greater impulsivity). On the other hand, bodily transformations gradually gain ground, but are progressive (body hair, voice, musculature), and regularly require psychological adjustment: modification of body image, new designation of certain body parts (legs become thighs, for example). In this context, Marc accepts my recommendation to engage ordinary medical follow-up for hormonal treatment, and thus to stop his solitary experimentation. This seems possible to him, whereas at the beginning of his transition journey, he claimed a more libertarian initiative. The doctor accepts the follow-up and prescribes substitution treatments to Marc, who applies the ointment daily. From this moment, a kind of stability in the transition journey emerges; the launch phase has passed, medical and psychological follow-ups are in place. The transferential relationship experiences calmer days than at the beginning; several months have passed. The technical vagaries of his transition take up less space; treatment is a routine; he can give free rein to his thought, during sessions, and the content of the psychic material brought changes considerably, thanks to this follow-up stability.

From gender as substance, Marc gradually fabricated something in relation to his body, a new and renewed body. This production manifested itself in alternation with moments of traversing the formless of great subjective destabilization, always experienced on the edge of rupture. Symptoms of depersonalization and hallucination occurred, always fleeting, always criticized, which we somehow repatriated each time into the psychic creation underway in the transferential space. Anxiety attacks temporarily required the support of medication treatment, in relay with a partner psychiatrist. Sensitive disorders and quasi-delusional productions were not treated with antipsychotic or other medications, in agreement with the psychiatrist. Their brief temporality encouraged us, at each stage, to integrate them successively into analytical work, their status then being more of a desubjectivation at work that deserved to be welcomed in the transference to find its resolution there.

Marc had already demonstrated to us his capacity to handle gender as a symbolic process mobilized in a progressive reinvestment of the body and language, notably through the production of new words charged with designating each part of his body, one after another, like a re-edition of the first discovery. This fruitful moment of work gave way, after a few months, to the emergence of gender as an imaginary object, whose composition first found its form and matter in these moments of traversing the formless. It is that the opening induced by recourse to gender engaged the creation of a new sex—and not only of a new sex. At this level, the analyst is called upon in a specific way when the imaginary of gender invites itself into him to give body—thus image—to the gender in becoming of the analyzing subject and, of this new sex co-occurring with gender at work. For if gender is put to work, it is to reinvent sex as we will further expose.

But how did this function? What psychic processes, particularly unconscious ones, can we describe? When gender resonates with its quality as imaginary object and symbolic process, it comes to discuss sex in its quality as imaginary instance and symbolic object, and it questions it, even if it means underlining the precariousness of the knowledge that accompanies its existence, for the subject and for the analyst. Sex thus questioned in its construction reveals the identificatory movements known, still unknown or to be recognized, of what in the analyst’s analysis could illuminate the constitution and sexual authorization of the sexed being, the semblance of woman or man to which the analyst refers, for example. This engages analytical work on the path of sexuation now thought of as imaginary process and symbolic instance. This is a first level of putting sex to work through gender in the analyst, when the analyst proposes to support the analyzing subject’s desire for analysis from the knowledge he has himself elaborated on his own account, for his own account, and which he continues to illuminate still, each time a cure invites him to move in body within the matrix of his knowledge.

Psychic elaborations, encouraged by each advance in analytical work, flourish in the patient’s dream activity or symptomatic productions, and also those of the analyst. A specular and non-specular representation of gender gradually emerges on the analyst’s side. One part allows itself to be represented and spoken, the analyst thinks or speaks it; another neighboring part outside the field of language, the analyst houses and dresses it.

This cohabitation of the analyst with this gender in construction-elaboration is traversed by what the transference engages. But it especially defines a work space where imagining the tracing of gender at work and in simultaneous construction, then allows it to be written. And that it be written gives an edge to the off-field of speech where gender can come either to overwhelm and prevent the elaboration of the analyzing subject’s new sex, or to support and energize this creation that the analyst can endorse as beyond the matrix, a matrix finally tranquilized by the void from which it is supported. Here is a second level of handling of gender by the analyst.

So perhaps gender is the name of this moment of transferential elaboration that unfolds regarding the other’s sex in the cure? Perhaps it is the name of what we identify as a work track where it would be appropriate to explore the analyst’s function as this “other of the sexual”? Perhaps it is the name of a place of sex in the psyche?

And the Phallus in all this? Transition to Christian Centner’s presentation

What is it for? Must we do without it? Is gender not a “fig leaf”? An avoidance of castration? A denial of the Phallus?

This is a surprise from my research.

Having been brought back to these formulas that I thought I could avoid, to discover that I knew very little about them and that they have a much broader scope than it appears, on the theoretical and also clinical level.

And having been brought back to them by trans persons, those whom the literature most often qualifies as psychotic and perverse, rejecting the Phallus and castration, as if these were effective characteristics, etc.

Having also noted that what happens in analytical work does not at all times fall under these formulas, particularly when it concerns in the analysis constructions linked to arrangements of sexuation, which until they succeed have unrecognizable forms with established theories or written formulas, and which invite us to think the work outside of them—not without Phallus, but temporarily outside-Phallus—until it becomes possible, later, to return to them to recognize oneself there or not.

In the in-between of these moments that the work punctuates, gender can serve the analyst to support these unconscious sexual creations, welcome “the gestation of a new sex,” contribute to arrangements of sexuation that gender vectorizes. The main handlings of gender that I have been able to identify for the moment are handlings that I qualify as being imaginary handlings.

Gender is a limit concept, a limit in the sense of the borderline limit, a frontier question just as the drive is a limit concept.

Perhaps gender is a borderline state of sexuation which, although not excluding the Phallus, sets itself the object of finding arrangements to sexuation whose realizations can be effected outside-phallus—but not without the phallus?

This outside-Phallus which is neither a time nor a space is perhaps the equivalent of what we designate as auxiliary ego in borderline clinical practice?

Gender does not call into question the Phallus but questions its limit as uncertainty, uncertainty which limits the limiting effects of the psychic treatment of things of sex.

Conclusion

There is an important limit to everything I have just said about what gender is or appears to be. It is that gender will above all have been useful to someone who will have been able to progress, thanks to it, in the experience of psychoanalysis, and that this someone cannot say much more than beyond himself, except perhaps to pass the word to others by stepping aside.

Appendices

EPSF – Clinical Morning

Gender clinic in psychoanalysis

Sunday, February 9, 2014 – CEASIL

Presentation by Vincent Bourseul

Possible articulations of gender and sex in five historical formulations:

1950-1960 – Gender is social sex (Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis)

1970-1980 – Gender creates sex (Sociology, Materialist Feminism)

1990 – Undoing gender, undoing sex (Gender Studies, Queer)

2000 – My sex is not my gender (Trans, Trans-feminism)

2010 – Gender undoes sex and creates sex (Psychoanalysis)

Gender in psychoanalysis, 1st proposed definition:

Gender is the limit situated both outside and inside sex, the shoreline or margin of sex capable of revealing its depth of field. Gender appears under the effect of the sexual; it questions the unconscious knowledges of sexual difference, and makes identifications waver until they are renewed. Thus, gender undoes sex and creates sex in the in-between of its intermittent disturbance, at the instant of stability in which it is felt.

Gender in psychoanalysis, 1st proposed mapping:

On the occasion of the doctoral thesis “Gender clinic in psychoanalysis,” gender, sex and sexuation were presented in their correspondences with the imaginary, symbolic and real registers based on their quality as object, process and instance. The result offers us the following coordinates:

	Imaginary	Symbolic	Real
Gender	object	process	impossible instance
Sex	instance	object	impossible process
Sexuation	process	instance	impossible object

Construction of the table:

The numbers (?) indicate the chronological order of appearance of elements during the research. Up to (3), these are elements emerging in clinical experience, (4) which is the first “instance” inscribed in the table, is deduced from (1), (2) and (3): it completes a first table. Then the table is extended to accommodate (5) as logical necessity to theoretical elaborations this time. From (5), everything else was completed by “pseudo-logical” deduction. The whole remains “to be verified.”

	Imaginary (1)	Symbolic (2)	Real (5)
Gender (1)	object (1)	process (3)	impossible instance (7)
Sex (2)	instance (4)	object (2)	impossible process (5)
Sexuation (6)	process (7)	instance (7)	impossible object (6)

Bibliographical references, Vincent Bourseul:

Vincent Bourseul, “Emergence and handling of gender in clinical practice. From substance to object,” Cliniques Méditerranéennes, no. 91, Ramonville Saint-Agne: Érès, 2015, forthcoming.

Vincent Bourseul, “Being a mother like a Man,” in Transgender kinship, (edited by Laurence Hérault and Irène Théry), Marseille: Presse Universitaire de Provence, 2014.

Vincent Bourseul, “The ‘gay gender’ and identity suffering: the slam phenomenon,” Nouvelle Revue de Psychosociologie, no. 17, Jouy-en-josas, 2014.

Vincent Bourseul, “Gender in psychoanalysis, perimeter of a definition,” Recherches en Psychanalyse, Paris: Recherches en Psychanalyse, 2014, forthcoming.

Vincent Bourseul, “The body makes language, speech makes the body: a politics of the body in Freud,” Champ Psy, no. 64, Paris: L’Esprit du Temps, 2013.

Vincent Bourseul, “Anatomy and destiny of ‘gender’ in Freud and some contemporaries,” L’Évolution Psychiatrique, Issy-les-Moulineaux: Eselvier Masson, 2013. In press. [online], posted November 23, 2013, URL: http://www.em-consulte.com/article/843937/anatomie-et-destin-du-%C2%A0genre%C2%A0-chez-freud-et-quelqu.

Vincent Bourseul, “H. I. and V., or love letters,” Cahiers de psychologie clinique, no. 38, Brussels: De Boeck Université, 2012, p. 161-177.

Vincent Bourseul, “The queer experience and the uncanny,” Recherches en Psychanalyse [online], 10|2010, posted February 11, 2011, URL: http://www.repsy.org/articles/2010-2-l-experience-queer-et-l-inquietant/

Vincent Bourseul, “Undoing one’s gender, for what purpose?”, Le journal des psychologues, no. 272, Paris: November 2009, pp. 60-64.

Other references directly related to the presentations:

ALESSANDRIN, A., From “transsexualism” to Trans becomings, Sociology thesis, University of Bordeaux Segaln, defended June 10, 2012.

BEATIE, T., Labour of love: The Story of One Man’s Extraordinary Pregnancy, Seal Press, 2008.

BOSWELL, John (1980), Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, Homosexuals in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the 14th Century, Paris: Gallimard, 1985, 521 p.

BOURCIER, Marie-Hélène, Queer Zones: Volume 3, Identities, Cultures and Politics, Paris: Amsterdam, 2011, 357 p.

BUTLER, Judith (1990), “Freud and the melancholy of gender,” Gender Trouble, For a feminism of subversion, Paris: La Découverte, 2005, p. 147-158.

BUTLER, J. (1993), Bodies That Matter, On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, Paris: Amsterdam, 2009.

BUTLER, Judith (2002), “Beside oneself: the limits of sexual autonomy,” Undoing Gender, Paris: Amsterdam, 2006, p. 31-56.

CAHUN, Claude (1930), Disavowals, Paris: Editions du Carrefour, 1930. Available in CAHUN, Claude, Writings, Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2002, p.335.

CALIFIA, Pat., Sex and Utopia, Paris: La Musardine, 2008.

CHAUNCEY, George, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, New York: Basic Books, 1995, 496 p.

COLLINS, Patricia Hill, Black Feminist Thought, New York: Routledge, 2000.

CONNELL, Raewyn, Gender, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.

CONNELL, Raewyn, Masculinities, Berkeley: University California Press, 1995.

CUSSET, François, French Theory, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co and the mutations of intellectual life in the United States, Paris: La Découverte, 2003, p. 19-20.

FAUSTO-STERLING, Anne, Sexing the Body, Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, Paris: La Découverte, 2012.

FLOYD, Kevin, The Reification of Desire, Toward a Queer Marxism, Paris: Amsterdam, 2103.

HALPERIN, David, How to be Gay, London: Harvard University Press, 2012.

HORNEY, Karen (1922), “On the genesis of the castration complex in women,” Feminine Psychology, Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 1969, p. 31-47.

JENTSCH, E. (1906), “On the psychology of the uncanny,” The Strange, Psychotherapeutic Studies, Imaginary and Unconscious, no. 17, Brussels: De Boeck Université, 1998, p. 37-48.

KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, Eve (1991), Epistemology of the Closet, Paris: Amsterdam, 2008, 257 p.

KOWSKA-REGNIER, Lalla (2005), “Trans Feminism or Transism,” Minorités,

[Online], URL: http://www.minorites.org/index.php/2-la-revue/375-transfeminisme-

ou-transinisme.html. Posted September 13, 2009.

LAQUEUR, Thomas, Making Sex, Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Paris: Gallimard, 1992, 355 p.

LAURETIS DE, Teresa, Queer Theory and Popular Cultures: from Foucault to Cronenberg, Paris: La Dispute, 2007, 189 p.

OAKLEY, Ann (1972), Sex, Gender and Society, Aldershot: Gower, 1972.

RUBIN, Gayle (1975), “The traffic in women,” Deviations, A Gayle Rubin Reader, Paris: Epel, 2010, p. 75.

SCOTT, Joan W., The Fantasy of Feminist History, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.

SCOTT, Joan W. (1986), “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” Le genre de l’histoire, Les cahiers du GRIF, 37-38, 1988, p. 125-153.

SCOTT, Joan (1999), “Some Reflections on Gender and Politics,” De l’utilité du genre, Paris: Fayard, 2012, p. 90.

VALERIO, Max Wolf, The Testosterone Files, My Hormonal and Social Transformation from FEMALE to MALE, Berkeley: Seal, 2006.

WEININGER, Otto (1923), Sexe et caractère, Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2012, 291 p.

WITTIG, Monique, La pensée Straight, Paris: Balland, 2001, 157 p.

Vincent Bourseul

Gender in Psychoanalysis: Return of the Critique of Knowledge3

 

 

This first text seeks to illuminate the history of the notion of gender since the 1950s and the relationship that the theories which have adopted it maintain with psychoanalysis in both experience and theory. The second text, “What Does Gender Do to Psychoanalysis, and What Can Psychoanalysis Do with It?” will focus more on the conditions for defining gender within the theoretical field of psychoanalysis, in relation to the emergence and handling of gender in clinical practice, up to questions related to sexuation and the phallus.

 

What I will address here is based on research conducted particularly within the framework of academic work, but above all, from a clinical experience from which I have extracted two main lines of inquiry: the trans question on one side and the gay question on the other, all against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic—a necessary clarification before going further, as a large part of these reflections would likely not have emerged without the reality effect of the HIV virus capable of disrupting meaning. Trans and gay are to be understood here as identity signifiers, to which gender brings us back and which it allows us to think about, and with them the question of identities in its contemporary relevance.

The prevailing common idea is to define gender as that which

pertains to the masculine and the feminine; this is indeed what a large part of the social sciences privileges as an approach, to the detriment of what gender is for many others. The gender I will discuss is therefore not that of grammar, nor that which is taken to be “social sex” as it is very often defined in its reduced form.

The fact is that gender, since it has been in circulation, has been covered by a good dozen different conceptions: sociological, philosophical, feminist, Marxist, genetic, political, psychiatric, minority, queer, heterocentered, gay, lesbian, trans, and others still.

While I thought until recently that a discussion on gender in psychoanalysis needed to be introduced by all sorts of preliminary considerations to facilitate its approach, I am now certain of one thing: everyone is perfectly immersed, willingly or not, in the debate on gender and in the current state of the mythological theory that now accompanies it, designated under the disputed name of “gender theory.”

This does not prevent almost no one from knowing what they are talking about when they speak of gender. Many are certain they know, when they claim or defend it. Most forget, voluntarily, that gender is above all an indefinable thing, which troubles and disturbs categories, and that this incompatibility with the effort of conceptualization is not a defect, but its main quality. This allows us to think very reasonably that there is no need to know what it is to benefit from what it does. Nevertheless, it is not forbidden to welcome it, and if we cannot give it a stable definition, we can at minimum describe its theoretical coordinates based on clinical experience.

In the media and political chaos of this past year, since the bill on “marriage for all” was put up for debate, undoubtedly in the worst possible manner, up to the beginnings of the debate on the proposed reform of family law (ultimately postponed by at least a year under pressure from fundamentalists)—and in particular questions related to abortion and medically assisted reproduction—gender has been used in every possible way. I cannot put it better than by using this culinary expression that illustrates the concoction in which media, politicians, advocacy activists, psychoanalysts, religious figures, a few paranoiacs, and other neo-Nazis participate. Which among them are capable of monitoring the cooking of this pot to prevent it from boiling over?

All this mess is both the worst moment to try to see clearly about gender, but also the best. Everything is there. Out in the open. One need only listen, or open the windows on demonstration days, to see in flesh and blood what gender produces as effects, what it reveals, what it is, and what it allows us to think about psychoanalytic theory and practice. “Gender trouble,” according to the established expression, is manifestly at work: it is having its effect.

In an interview published this month in the journal Vacarme, Joan Scott returns to her career as a researcher and her encounter with gender. In passing, she provides a definition close to those I initially refer to, before proposing my own in turn. She recalls that gender is first and foremost the means of discussing the manifest and hidden meaning of the links between biological attributions and social roles, of questioning the naturalness and historicity of sex. Namely, that there is nothing

“natural” about a male human being becoming a man and holding more power than a woman, for example, and, something often forgotten today, that there have not always been two sexes for medical and scientific knowledge (until the 18th century) and that the supposed difference between the sexes has not always been so firmly indexed in discourse to the number two—this should be discussed from the perspective of language. Thus, since 1986, Joan Scott has defined gender as “a useful category

of historical analysis.” This is undoubtedly the most interesting definition

for psychoanalysts among those in circulation, the closest to what psychoanalysts can do with gender.

 

This is certainly not the first modern conception of gender, since we owe to John Money in 1953 and Robert Stoller in 1964 the definition of gender and gender identity—then the core gender identity—based on work on intersexuality and transsexualism. Stoller’s conception, inspired by Money’s, remains to this day the majority reference among mental health professionals regarding gender. It is not, however, the most interesting in terms of conceptual elaboration

and clinical handling. To this must be added that their proposals have since been put through the mill of feminist, queer, postmodern, and trans thinking, which have largely changed the situation over the past thirty years. Money and Stoller have a very adaptive approach to gender, reifying in their proposals its dimension of social and cultural learning, emphasizing the constraint that these determinants exert on the psyche or the psychological. With them, gender is not a psychic creativity that could have an influence on the social, but a social adaptation of the psyche invited to conform under the effect of interaction. In my view, the following definition by Money is one of the most interesting: “Gender identity is the intimate experience of sexual identity, and sexual identity is the public expression of gender identity.” Following Money, Stoller rethought gender identity by giving it a “core gender identity,” acquired in the early ages of life, which gives gender an evolutionist turn that does not take into account the circularity induced in Money between the individual and the collective.

Their work largely inspired and supported the developments of gender in the discourse of materialist feminism of the 1970s. The social perspective of sex determined by cultural learning became established. In 1972, in her work Sex, Gender and Society, Ann Oakley inaugurated what has since been considered the study of social relations of sex. In France, we refer to Danièle Kergoat, Christine Delphy, or Nicole-Claude Mathieu, for example. At that time, gender was thought of in a way that we can retain through the following formula: “Gender creates sex.”

 

But this cannot be grasped without taking up the historical thread of the dangerous liaisons between sex and gender since the beginning of the 20th century. I propose to scatter here and there a few formulas that we will then summarize. These sentences are taken out of context; they no longer mean much, but they continue to say enough to have marked minds. First, in 1923, there is Sigmund Freud’s statement: “Destiny is anatomy.” In writing this, he does not consider gender, but anticipates the psychic consequences of anatomical difference, which he will discuss in 1925. His maxim remains the object of all controversies, and its real scope is kept under the rug. Let us regret in passing that the reference to “destiny” is not heard here in Freud’s use of what must be fought to avoid its prophecy (destiny neurosis), and moreover that anatomy is very far from covering in Freud the biological, which is not reduced to it, as it undeniably constitutes in him a veritable model of inspiration from the living. Deprived of these coordinates, Freud’s anatomical destiny still constitutes, in the eyes of some, proof of a narrow-mindedness reduced to the penis.

In 1949, we can retain from Simone de Beauvoir this

famous phrase: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” With her

new feminist approaches were inaugurated, preceding the thinking on the social construction of identity that would follow a decade or so later.

 

The 1950s-1960s are predominantly inscribed in sociological thought; they already share almost nothing—at least in appearance—with psychoanalytic theories, except for a few points of opposition. This divide between psychoanalytic theories and what would become modern feminism of the 1970s seems to be established in these years 1950-1960, which are also a turning point in the history of the French and global psychoanalytic movement: splits, exclusions, foundations. And it is also the moment when so-called “postmodern” philosophy develops in France. This philosophy, then constituted by authors such as Deleuze, Derrida, but also Lacan, read in the United States by Americans, became in the 1960s what has since been called French Theory. At the same time, these critical thinkers of the knowledge system are, without being directly involved, among the sources of what was called in English universities Cultural Studies: an “anti-discipline” of the 1960s, highly critical, presenting itself as anti-academic, and providing a transversal approach to popular, contestatory, and minority cultures.

In 1971, Lacan stated: “The woman does not exist.” He does not criticize the woman identity promoted by feminists in spite of themselves, but shifts the question with the formulas of sexuation and the “not-all phallic,” which will not be widely heard in this way in these moments of egalitarian demands. Social claims then seeming to poorly accommodate or be supported by psychoanalytic experience. Differently, from 1970, English Cultural Studies were imported to the United States, where they intersected with French Theory. And this at the moment when Lesbian and Gay Studies were being constituted, not without links, particularly at the University of San Francisco, which opened the first undergraduate secondary education program devoted to LGBTQ Studies (New York City University opened the first post-graduate university degree in 1986, sixteen years later). During this period, a profusion of knowledge ordinarily perceived as minority became established as official knowledge. They reconfigured the landscape of university knowledge and gained their credentials, under the influence of thinking nourished by the deconstruction of knowledge through the philosophical thought of deconstruction, through the experience of the unconscious, and through critical thinking about dominations of all kinds.

Academicism was called into question in the United States, in universities, under the effect of thinking breaking with its own sources, made free to explore a new territory where its own precursors no longer recognize themselves, where all new paradigms are regularly ransacked to open at each turn new perspectives to the critical knowledge of knowledge and its own constitution. The notions of “situated knowledges” of feminism of that era appeared, and since then, for example, the thinking of intersectionality—sex, race, class—imbued with third-generation feminism: that of

Black Feminists from 20 years ago, and that of Chicanas who immigrated to the United States today, which we can follow with current trans-feminism

—that arising from transgender or transsexual feminists.

In 1975, Gayle Rubin wrote: “psychoanalysis is a failed feminist theory.” To which she added: “Since psychoanalysis is a theory of gender, to discard it would be suicidal for a political movement

dedicated to eradicating gender hierarchy” (or gender itself). “Gender studies” did not yet exist as such, but the first works that would soon expand into a corpus had already begun: those of the critique of masculine domination are the most famous. If the term “gender” was used in the United States, in France at the same period we preferred, notably under the influence of Lévi-Strauss, to speak of sexual differences. This is what would accentuate this return effect that we have seen taking place for about thirty years under the features of gender or gender.

This is what happened between the 1960s and 1980s between France, Great Britain, and the United States, around Cultural Studies, French Theory, and LGBT and Queer Studies, in which we can find the historical threads or read the effects of the nourishing thoughts of these movements: philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and others.

If all these turns and recompositions, these knotting and unknotting, took place in the same period, it is not by chance. Elements had to separate in order to articulate or knot with others. We regularly lose sight of this aspect of this moment of separation-configuration, which nevertheless explains certain transformations. If psychoanalysis seems to be severely shunned by feminist discourse from the 1960s-1970s onward, and even more so since by queer theories, we must look at this more closely. We cannot be satisfied with this supposed resistance to psychoanalysis, with which we too often content ourselves to explain that social movements or emerging thoughts seem to want to know nothing of the unconscious—implying thereby that we can do nothing about it.

Beyond this vast critique of knowledge as a method and experience shared with psychoanalysis and philosophy in particular, let us note that the knowledge concerned by these intellectual movements is linked to sexualities, as practices and beyond, in their social, cultural, political, and psychological resonances. These are minority questions arising from sexual minorities that emerge with Cultural Studies, with Queer and Gender Studies, whether those arising from the female minority, lesbians, gays, transsexuals, blacks, or immigrants.

We have not seen Patriarchs Studies or Good

Family Fathers Studies appear in universities. Why? Because these theories are taught by default, in the shadow of knowledge—this is the critical point of view. Because the knowledge that these appellations could cover is taught in ignorance of itself, which on one side feminists can combat, and which on another side psychoanalysts can hear when in both cases the ignorance of this knowledge to be criticized ends up becoming symptomatic, psychically or socially.

 

I hypothesize that this return, or this extension, of this critical experience of knowledge comes straight from the knowledge about the sexual brought forth by psychoanalysis. If through psychoanalysis, the knowledge about the sexual that it helped to bring forth had not spread in effects of knowledge, perhaps we would not have seen all these critical movements for the liberation of sexual minorities develop.

These theoretical and practical movements are often determined against psychoanalysis perceived as conservative. Almost all are based on the experience of psychoanalysis, while maintaining a severe critique against it. The most recognized theorists of Queer or Gender Theories have often claimed their personal experience of psychoanalysis. When Rubin consecrates psychoanalysis as a “failed feminist theory,” she durably inscribes Freudian sexuality on the board of queer and feminist theories that will follow.

But the developments of these theories take place far from the couches for the vast majority of those who study and extend these thoughts: the 1970s eventually give way to the 1980s and 1990s, psychoanalysis is no longer perceived as a thought and practice

of sexual emancipation. Feminist critiques of psychoanalysis by Gayle Rubin or Monique Wittig participate in a movement of depreciation of historical psychoanalysis, while at the same time knowledge about the sexual constitutes a historical element of the deployment of these critical thoughts, without there being any need to notice it, so much so that we no longer pay attention to it. We do not see that the social and cultural emancipation of sexualities placed in minorities is also sustained by the liberation of knowledge about the sexual that psychoanalysis has provoked, not as a theoretical corpus or movement of thought, but as a singular experience of some of the most famous theorists of these postmodern currents. When in

1978 Wittig wrote “Lesbians are not women,” she

explained thereby that lesbians escape the economic, political, and social sexual categories that are man and woman. Even if her formula is related to that of Beauvoir, we can also read it with that of Lacan.

 

When in 1992 Judith Butler published her famous Gender Trouble, she developed that if gender can be undone, it is because it is a doing, and that sex consequently is also a doing, a doing linked to the doing of gender, and to the undoing of gender which reopens the perspective of a possible doing of sex. What then prevails is translated in the formula “undoing gender, undoing sex.”

The setting in motion of the doing and undoing of gender coincides with the arrival in France of queer, as thought and as movement. The queer movement in the United States is certainly not the one that most colonized universities as Gender Studies and Cultural Studies did, but the latter are not without direct links to queer thought. Contrary to or beyond what Elisabeth Roudinesco recently said in the Huffington Post, queer is not a subgroup or a minority groupuscule, but much more an experience of questioning the boundaries of the strange and the uncanny that is not defined by academic teachings nor reduced to the existence of a social group. Queer is neither more nor less than the name of the recent form that the Freudian uncanny applied to the sexual can take in our modernity, when the sexual comes to be represented in the social. Queer is a thought of strangeness not assimilable to established knowledge nor to any identity, since queer is beyond identities and is founded on the return to the surface of conflicts and horrors buried under the bushel by identities when they are founded on repression. Queer is the possibility of this return assumed by those who do not want to cover it up too quickly again. Queer is not assimilable to gender or its history; it is as much the abject in Jean Genet as “the impossible homosexual” in Lee Edelman, for example.

 

During these years 1990-2000, the so-called gay movement reached its identity peak; there was less talk of the “homosexual community” but rather of the “gay community,” which included both gay men and lesbian women, as well as transsexual persons, without the latter, however, having a say in the community title, at least not immediately. Gradually the L of lesbians came to be attached to the G of gays. A feminist consideration of the situation of homosexual women materialized, for example in the re-designation of the annual homosexual pride march—the pride—as Lesbian and Gay Pride.

A new trans discourse then emerged, made possible by a taking of freedom by trans persons beyond the assignment of places in discourse that identity movements had reserved for them. The edges of queer proved unstable in welcoming trans diversity and the fundamental questions that trans persons activate. I say trans to take up the way in which those who would have been designated previously as transsexuals began to circulate new signifiers: trans (2004-2005) and transgender, notably. I say at the edges of queer, because it is at the margin of the margin, as always, that the most interesting things appeared and continue to emerge, those capable of informing us about the sometimes discreet pathologies of the norm.

At the beginning of the third millennium, the signifier transpédégouines also appeared, which testifies to a questioning of the LGBT acronym, which had meanwhile become the official abbreviation to represent the diversity of the different sexual minorities that compose the homosexual community of yesteryear, which had become different from itself, and within which oppressions are exercised between the different positions of power. Gay, lesbian, bi, and trans are not on the same footing in this community fiction. LGBT, let us note, appeared under the influence of the necessities of political claims discourse. During this recent period, LGBT was joined by the Q of queer, because some ended up claiming it as an identity in its own right, even if it contradicted the initial meaning, to give LGBTQ, to which is added today the I of intersex, the very latest arrivals in what can no longer be thought of as the “homosexual community,” but the “LGBTQI community.”

Identities are severely called into question, crushed behind the small letters charged with representing them, reduced to not much alongside the subjects themselves constrained by this acronymic dictatorship. Perhaps identities are reified by these letters, and not only reduced? What consequences can this have on subjects? What does this singular example teach us about the evolution of sexual identity, in the era of gender?

 

If we continue with these elements, in this direction, sexual orientation manifestly no longer has much meaning. Since by definition, the conjunction of letters makes common lot of what we would have designated in other times by homosexuality or heterosexuality or bisexuality or transsexuality designating in turn choices, preferences, non-choices, or effects of choices. Henceforth, this no longer holds; the Ts are just as much homo or hetero, as can be their partners, whether they are G, B, Q, I, or H—because it is appropriate to add the H of heteros who can be partners for the Gs, the Bs, the Ls, the Ts, the Qs, the Is, or ultimately other Hs. Nothing more seems to be missing from the call of LGBTQIH. But in appearance only.

Indeed, that there is strangeness, bizarreness, and homosexuality is maintained it seems in this identity convergence, but without being represented any longer in previously known forms. What allowed itself to be observed and thought through the prism of notions such as sexual orientation

or sexual identity has freed itself from them thanks to the effects of gender, by becoming plural genders situated certainly in an identity field but freed from a strict assignment of predetermined sex or sexual preference, exercising the possibility of a transformation of the living conditions of the subject caught in a discourse. What is “homosexual” in common could be replaced by bizarre or queer or minority. The social marginality of certain sexual minorities is no longer that of the inverts or perverts described in the last century, but it is the marginality of those whom a draconian identity discourse organizes when it takes over from the old pathologizing discourses of psychiatry or even psychoanalysis. We can dare to say that either the camp of perverts has normalized itself, or it is perversion that has abandoned sexual minorities. The marginality that gender highlights is that of the identity vulnerability of an era when certain transformations of the relations between the signifier and the performative have perhaps proven that identities are processes in their own right and no longer only the productions of identificatory processes: they have gained their autonomy, this is not without concomitant effects of liberation and subjective restriction.

Thus, that there is still sexual orientation, homosexuality or heterosexuality or coherent bisexuality seems denied by the LGBTQI designation itself. Clearly, what federates is no longer the supposed meaning of a sexual preference. The minority factor seems much more to be the organizing principle of this amalgam. This is very enlightening on what gender allows when it favors an almost permanent reconfiguration of the identity veneer and thus a relaunching of identifications, particularly those of so-called sexual identities supposed to be stable and identifiable.

So much so that since the 2000s, under the influence of trans persons not always satisfied with the amalgamated T, another consideration of sex and gender began to impose itself under the formula “my sex is not my gender.” The sex in question there is no longer the sex of materialist feminism, nor even that of the “undoing gender, undoing sex” of Gender Theories. The gender in question today in “my sex is not my gender” is not the gender of the 1970s. And the sex in question henceforth is not biological sex, but a new sex, a sex undone by gender itself undone, and created anew, created as novelty in its own right, a new sex—as I designate it—that would no longer be quite ignorant of its non-naturalness, of its non-historicity except that of subjective history, a sex enlightened about its knotting with gender and its sexual non-omnipotence, a sex knowledgeable of its sexual incompetence and its gender determination: a sort of a-sex made possible by gender when it undoes sex.

It is this sex that the clinic of gender in psychoanalysis offers us to approach, to understand its constructions first, then to explore it in the different handlings it makes possible in clinical work, in analytical constructions and the renewed and sometimes even new interpretations it favors, and which allow us not to retreat too much before these new sexual figures that have not finished destabilizing us under the effect of the knowledge about the sexual that we receive in this return movement.

 

So to conclude the list of this historical evolution of notions and concepts, and emphasizing again the underlying dynamic that I have qualified as being a return of the critique of knowledge, I finally proposed at the end of my research—which is only beginning—this formula:

“gender undoes sex and creates sex.” The repetition of the word sex implies that it is not the same one, and that some possible reformulations of the goal of analysis open up here in light of gender, the description of a possible sexual creation that the cure could aim for with the arrangement of sexuation of which gender is the vector, toward the creation of the new sex.

Vincent Bourseul

What does gender do to psychoanalysis, and what can psychoanalysis do with it?

Gender is not necessary for psychoanalysis, because psychoanalysis has already developed an entire theoretical corpus that allows thinking about the sexual, working with Freudian sexuality, which is, let us not forget, the best currently available way of thinking about things of sex and sexuality. To this, gender adds nothing, a priori, except that it is a good means—the most current—of taking up the examination of certain notions not at all psychoanalytic, but which have nevertheless enjoyed a certain success in the discourse of psychoanalysts, in their writings, to the point that they can often be perceived as psychoanalytic concepts. Among them, let us note “sexual difference,” “sexual orientation,” or “homosexuality,” and “identity” that gender questions in its relationship to psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis with it.

After some time of research, I ended up giving gender the following definition: gender is the limit situated both outside and inside sex, the littoral or the margin of sex capable of revealing its depth of field. Gender appears under the effect of the sexual; it questions unconscious knowledge of sexual difference, and makes identifications waver until their renewal. Thus, gender undoes sex and creates sex in the in-between of its intermittent trouble, at the moment of stability where it is experienced. In this definition, sex and gender are neither opposed nor complementary, but knotted together; it is as knotting that they seemed to me to be able to be approached in attempts at elaboration supported by experience.

This conception breaks quite clearly with the classical distinctions I spoke of earlier. I could say this differently by insisting on the fact that this knotting imposed itself in the clinic, and that it is a contribution that I situate as being that of trans persons—not transsexuals or transgenders, but indeed trans persons, as the signifier trans gradually imposed itself in discourse. Trans is not the in-between of man and woman, it is not the third sex either. Trans reveals a place, a third place which, when considered,

allows a three-way knotting of man-woman-trans to appear. This is what trans persons taught me. And this is how, thanks to them, I found myself on the path of the formulas of sexuation and Borromean clinic, which I thought I could avoid at the start, hoping to be able to content myself with a quick conceptual facelift. I ultimately could not escape the implants.

This definition imposed itself to respond, in particular, to the necessity of accounting for gender beyond the masculine/feminine conception that is often given to it, and which proves to be very insufficient or even counterproductive. Gender, in the perspective in which I envision it, is useful if it allows maintaining this tension toward the deepening of sexual difference and the knowledge extracted from it. Gender is useful to us in psychoanalysis if it serves us as an operator capable of maintaining trouble, an experience of trouble that brings us back and exposes us to the experience of sexual difference as it does not cease to occur, although what we fabricate from it as knowledge (as sexual identity and other psychic constructions still) allows us no longer to see it at work nor to experience it too much.

 

Applied to clinical experience, this definition and this conception of gender allows, in my view, envisioning gender and sex as the two unknowns of an insoluble equation: the equation of the enigma of the sexual represented by sexuality (which allows us in passing to advance on a sort of conception of sexuality in psychoanalysis). This perspective implies presaging nothing of what gender and sex can possibly mean or represent, and attempting to give them a new life.

To advance in my work, I had to choose a method. And to not complicate the task too much, I adopted, as much as possible, the Freudian method. Thus, I chose to observe gender and sex—these two unknowns—through the Freudian triptych: topical, economic, and dynamic. In doing so, gender and sex began to take forms and meanings in terms of object, process, and instance. A table at the end of the text gathers these coordinates; it is not definitive to date and needs to be verified. This table is a second other way of defining or situating gender in relation to sex and the sexual, in a metapsychological and perhaps Borromean perspective. So gender in psychoanalysis, what is it for?

Sexual difference

Gender is first of all useful to the other, and moreover, gender is always first the gender of the other. It reminds us that the sexual is always already inhabited by the other, starting with oneself. This is something I learned recently, since the thesis was defended and awarded a prize for gender studies. On several occasions, readers of this thesis have told me: “What you say about gender is interesting, but it’s still very much about gay gender”; others told me: “What you say about gender is interesting, but it’s still very much about trans gender.” Need I specify that the first quote comes from an interlocutor who is a priori hetero or straight, and the second from an interlocutor who is a priori homo or gay? I can add to this anecdote by telling you that a trans friend once told me, in the same vein, “it’s just like your gender, at least it reminds gays that we—trans people—don’t just dream of sleeping with heteros, we do it, and why? Because gender doesn’t scare us, we invented it.”

This anecdote reveals that gender reactivates the singular

and subjective experience of having to situate oneself and situate the other within the sexual landscape. When gender emerges or is discussed (as we are about to do here), each person unfortunately finds themselves closer to this experience of sexual difference which is constantly at work, but which we manage to avoid head-on thanks to the knowledge we construct to face it, as they say. Of this knowledge necessary to face the sexual difference at work, gender specifically pins down what we call “the difference between the sexes,” without remembering that this difference between the sexes does not pre-exist the sexes for which it nevertheless establishes a kind of relationship. By forgetting all too quickly that we construct it precisely to make comfortable this incessant experience of sexual difference, which does not predict the number of sexes to be found there, but which we attempt to maintain as two, no doubt to make our task easier.

 

Gender reactivates this work of inventorying the knowledge necessary for us to face sexual difference, between infantile theories, beliefs, imaginary knowledge, scientific knowledge, etc. The difference between the sexes is neither a notion nor a psychoanalytic concept, yet it is commonly invoked by the discourse of psychoanalysts regarding sexuality, which has still not found a definition or conception within the field of psychoanalysis. That the two of the two sexes has imposed itself for so long to the point that it is deduced to be quite tenacious in the psyche does not mean that it is not the result of something. Is it the product of a psychic operation, or the effect of a structure such as that of a language? Is it the two of a “two sexes” in the unconscious? This is not a priori what the formulas of sexuation allow us to deduce, according to my reading of them. So how can we explain why this famous “difference between the sexes” is so present, and preferred over “sexual differences”? Perhaps it is because it bears witness to theoretical necessity as a fiction; perhaps this “difference between the sexes” currently plugs a place of knowledge where something still escapes us too violently for us to face it more calmly. But I cannot say between what and what “the difference between the sexes” comes to act as a barrier or a plug by making us believe we know something through it, unlike “sexual orientation,” which I will speak about now, and which establishes itself, in my view, in the place of a fictive articulation between “sexuation” and “object choice.”

 

Sexual orientation

I already spoke about it in the first part; it is “sexual orientation” as a non-psychoanalytic notion, again, but so commonly accepted that one can also suppose it sometimes influences the thinking of psychoanalysts, and perhaps their work. The idea of sexual orientation is not confused with the question of object choice; it does not substitute for it, but sometimes seems to extend or cover it. Regarding this, gender makes us feel that despite ourselves, we are also influenced by the idea of sexual orientation and not only guided by the psychoanalytic notion of object choice. We sometimes believe, more than we admit, in homosexuality or heterosexuality or bisexuality as if they existed. And this persists, even though the sexual orientations linked to them seem to have been transformed in recent decades, under the influence of identities, to the point of no longer being recognizable or conceivable with previously acquired benchmarks. Have we taken the measure of this?

Let us think, for example, of the case of Marc, whom I will speak to you about again later regarding the imaginary handling of gender in practice. This trans boy, this transboy, this trans man, raises questions. He loves girls and women, just as he loved girls and women in the time before his transition. Before that time, he was a not-yet trans-man who loved women as an a priori woman; therefore, he was a lesbian woman at the time when she was not spoken of as he and man. He was a feminine homosexual and today he is a masculine heterosexual. His object choice has not changed a priori; his sexual orientation has clearly changed direction, but also pole, moving from feminine to masculine and from a homosexuality to a heterosexuality; in other words, Marc’s case highlights to what extent sexual orientation literally has no meaning. But Marc was never a girl; it is we who must imagine it to alleviate the trouble his situation creates for us. It is we who invent sexual orientation out of thin air to find our bearings, to try to see clearly. But there is nothing to see, that is precisely the trouble; there is only to contemplate what cannot be seen, what is missing and calls for something to come there: an object, a piece of knowledge, an infantile theory, etc.

From this hypothesis that sexual orientation has no meaning, we can perceive the role we make it play, quite despite ourselves, in theory. To summarize what I have just said very quickly, it seems to me that this non-psychoanalytic notion comes to the aid of psychoanalytic concepts, and that it is adopted for the comfort it brings. Sexual orientation is a kind of binder between sexuation on one side and object choice on the other. Although there is, a priori, no necessity to hold together object choice and sexuation, which do not deal with the same things at all, the fact remains that in ordinary life, something in the order of the consequences of sexuation does indeed articulate with what represents object choice in everyday life, and that we are undoubtedly invited to give meaning to this through this imaginary junction that is sexual orientation—which would therefore be an infantile sexual theory. Sexual orientation fulfills this fiction and moves us away from knowledge of the sexual—as unconscious knowledge. It is perhaps at this level that those false theoretical insights, for which psychoanalysis often pays the price, take place: where there is only a gap to be observed between the sexuation of the subject of the unconscious on one side (the formulas of sexuation) and sexual reality on the other (sexual practices, sexual life), where the individual untangles their relationship to the species.

Identity26

By revising our habits regarding supposed sexual orientations and the difference between the sexes, we can also reconsider our relationship to the notion of identity. Identity is not a productive notion in psychoanalysis; we infinitely prefer to think of identifications. Certainly, identities do not account in all their truth for the identifications that found them, which is a loss for those interested in mobilizing underlying psychic resources. But identities constitute a pole of narcissistic attractiveness that we would be wrong to do without when thinking and acting in clinical work.

Let us take the gay identity, and see what the specifics of this

minority identity teach us about the general. Beyond the identity marker, and although it sometimes claims to, the gay identity fundamentally says nothing about sexual orientation—since the latter possibly has no meaning. Thus, practice teaches us that many homosexuals may not recognize themselves as gay, since the identity marker, which sometimes counts as sexual identity and sometimes as gender identity, allows one to withdraw from it as much as to be pinned down by discourse. Subjective positioning in the field of social representations accords more or less with the subjective determinant.

So why think, as common thought suggests,

that homosexuals are gays, or that gays are homosexuals? Why hold together a gender identity—the gay identity—and the fiction of a sexual orientation—acting as the joint between sexuation and object choice—if not to leave aside the impossible of sexual identity—in the sense of what escapes knowledge of the sexual that identity, whatever it may be, cannot truly represent in the social sphere?

 

Certain clinical situations require visiting these questions. The phenomenon of slam—intravenous drug use in a sexual context, which appeared among gay men in the years 2004-2005—is a very good example. Within a so-called sexual community, what was once called homosexual, men, mostly HIV-positive, began injecting drugs of a new kind—cathinones—within the framework

of their sexual life, to the point that this consumption is no longer just a support for sexuality, but a sexual practice in its own right, which the concept of addiction is unable to illuminate. How can we grasp that these men, gays for the most part and gays in the eyes of all, HIV-positive, found themselves in this sub-community of slammers, ready to explore in every corner a drug consumption behavior with rapid and massive deleterious effects?

This phenomenon is an identity symptom; that is my starting hypothesis. These HIV-positive gay men pay the price for the intra-community repression of an epidemic and its representatives, whom the common community attempts to exclude within itself, similar to Freud’s concept of splitting, relegating the irreconcilable representation toward the formation of a second psychic group where it is consigned to oblivion. In Nancy, Bataille, and Blanchot, the community feeds on the death of the individual, necessary for the very advent of the community. To support the subject against the identity-based “being-in-common” which sometimes merges with death as a communal work, gender can operate in the transference an opening in the implacable process of gender identification—to be joined with already known identifications: projective, melancholic, hysterical, etc.

 

How to proceed clinically before this so striking collusion between an epidemic and an identity, if not by proposing that the signifier gay—marker of the identity in question—be subjected to the effort of deconstruction, to be undone just as gender was undone previously in the recent history of sexual identities—undoing gender, undoing the gay? The deconstruction of gender is a possible path to the opening of sex as an identity representative, without the need to abandon identities, from which we can profit for the work of libidinal mobilization.

 

Handling of gender

Marc27 is 22 years old when we meet for the first time, during a consultation at my office. His initial request, as expressed, concerns his transition journey, for which he wishes to have a space to think and progress in this “sexual voyage.” This “psy” follow-up cannot be integrated into the framework of the mandatory follow-up required by the official protocol in France for this type of support, when hormonal treatment is desired, followed by surgery28. But this is not Marc’s wish, as he is already taking hormones from the black market. And above all, he does not wish for any surgery, so he has no “interest” in joining an official transition follow-up. Marc works; he holds a job in the commercial sector, he is a salesman. He lives alone in Paris, where he grew up. His income allows him to live comfortably according to him, to ensure the advancement of his “sexual voyage” project, and to pay for “psy” sessions. Marc is a trans boy, heterosexual, who loves girls, women, or trans women, as he specified the perimeter of his heterosexuality29. He had never seen a “psy” before meeting me. How did he choose me? Because one of his friends who comes to see me gave him my address and contact details. We begin the follow-up, at a rate of one interview per week to start.

 

Very quickly, the question of hormones takes on importance in Marc’s discourse. He has just started this “treatment,” as he calls it, although he does not benefit from a medical prescription or financial coverage for said treatment. His supply is regular, similar to the methods used by certain athletes to obtain testosterone. With medical follow-up and a proper prescription, Marc could benefit from a Testogel®30 treatment, an ointment. For various reasons, it is testosterone for intramuscular injection that he procures and injects himself after taking some advice from a nurse friend.

The first effects of testosterone on the psychological level are no longer increasing. Marc has generally become accustomed to the novelties of masculine characteristics (increased libido, greater perceived impulsivity). On the other hand, bodily transformations are gradually gaining ground (hair growth, voice, musculature), and regularly require psychological adjustment: modification of the body image, new designation of certain body parts (legs become thighs, for example). In this context, Marc accepts my recommendation to engage in ordinary medical follow-up for the hormonal treatment, and thus to stop his solitary experimentation. This seems possible to him, whereas at the beginning of his transition journey he claimed a more libertarian initiative. The doctor accepts the follow-up and prescribes the replacement treatment to Marc, who applies the ointment daily. From this moment—the launch phase having passed, medical and psychological follow-ups being in place—a kind of stability in the transition journey emerges. The transferential relationship experiences calmer days than at the beginning—several months have passed. The technical hazards of his transition take up less space, the treatment is a routine, he can give free rein to his thoughts during the sessions, and the content of the psychic material brought changes considerably.

 

From gender in substance—hormone—Marc gradually manufactured something in relation to his body, a new and renewed body. This production manifested in alternating moments of

“crossing the formless31” linked to a great subjective destabilization,

always experienced on the edge of rupture. Symptoms of depersonalization and hallucination occurred, always fleeting, always criticized, which we repatriated as best we could each time into the psychic creation underway in the transferential space. Anxiety attacks temporarily required the support of medication, in coordination with a partner psychiatrist. Sensory disturbances and quasi-delusional productions were not treated with antipsychotic or other medications, in agreement with the psychiatrist. Their brief duration encouraged us, at each stage, to integrate them successively into the analytical work, their status then being more a matter of a desubjectivation at work that deserved to be welcomed in the transference to find its resolution.

Marc had already demonstrated to us his ability to handle gender as a symbolic process mobilized in a progressive reinvestment of the body and language, notably through the production of new words intended to designate each part of his body, one after the other, like a re-edition of the first discovery. After a few months, this fruitful moment of work gave way to the emergence of gender as an imaginary object, whose composition first found its form and matter in those moments of crossing the formless. This is because the opening induced by the recourse to gender engaged the creation of a new sex—and not just a new sex. At this level, the analyst is called upon in a specific way when the imaginary of gender invites itself into him to give body—and therefore image—to the gender in the making of the analyzing subject, and to this new sex co-occurring with the gender at work. For if gender is put to work, it is to reinvent sex, as we shall further explain.

 

But how did it work? What psychic processes, particularly unconscious ones, can we describe? When gender resonates with its quality as an imaginary object and symbolic process, it comes to discuss with sex in its quality as an imaginary instance and symbolic object, and it questions it, even highlighting the precariousness of the knowledge that accompanies its existence, for the subject and for the analyst. Sex thus challenged in its construction reveals the known, still unknown, or to-be-recognized identificatory movements of what, in the analyst’s own analysis, could illuminate the constitution and sexual authorization of the sexed being, the semblance of woman or man by which the analyst finds their bearings, for example. This sets the analytical work on the path of a sexuation now thought of as an imaginary process and symbolic instance. This is a first level of putting sex to work through gender in the analyst, when the latter proposes to support the analysand’s desire for analysis based on the knowledge they have themselves developed for their own account, on their own account, and which they continue to illuminate further, each time a cure invites them to move in body within the matrix of their knowledge.

Psychic elaborations, encouraged by each advance in the analytical work, flourish in the patient’s dream activity or symptomatic productions, and also those of the analyst. A specular and non-specular representation of gender gradually emerges on the analyst’s side. One part allows itself to be represented and said; the analyst thinks or speaks it; another part resides outside the field of language; the analyst hosts and tends to it. The seen, the heard, the felt, remobilized in this return and this crossing of the formless, perhaps engage a work where the primal repressed finds here the path of a formal recomposition.

This cohabitation of the analyst with this gender in construction-elaboration is traversed by what the transference engages. But it above all defines a workspace where one can imagine the outline of gender at work and in simultaneous construction, and then allows it to be written. And that it be written provides an edge to the off-camera of speech where gender can either overwhelm and prevent the elaboration of the analysand’s new sex, or support and dynamize this creation that the analyst can take on as beyond the matrix, a matrix finally calmed of the void by which it is supported. This is a second level of the handling of gender by the analyst.

 

So perhaps gender is the name of this moment of transferential elaboration that unfolds regarding the sex of the other in the cure? Perhaps it is the name of what we identify as a line of work where it would be appropriate to explore the function of the analyst as this “other of the sexual”? Perhaps it is the name of a place of sex in the psyche?

 

And the phallus in all this?

What is it for? Should we do without it? Is gender not a “fig leaf”? An avoidance of castration? A denial of the phallus?

This is a surprise of my research. Having been brought back to these formulas that I thought I could avoid, only to discover that I knew little about them and that they have a much broader scope than it seems, on both theoretical and clinical levels. And having been brought back to them by trans people, those whom literature most often qualifies as psychotic and perverse, rejecting the phallus and castration, as if these were still obvious characteristics, etc.

Having also noted that what happens in analytical work does not always fall under these formulas, notably when, during the analysis, it concerns constructions linked to the arrangements of sexuation which, until they succeed, have forms unrecognizable by means of established theories or written formulas, and which invite us to think of the work outside of them—not without the phallus, but off-phallus (temporarily)—until it is possible, later, to return to them to recognize oneself in them or not.

In the in-between of these moments punctuated by the work, gender can serve the analyst to support these unconscious sexual creations, welcome “the gestation of a new sex,” and contribute to arrangements of sexuation that gender vectorizes. The main handlings of gender that I have been able to identify for the moment are handlings that I qualify as being imaginary handlings.

 

Gender is a limit concept, a limit in the sense of the limit of the borderline state, a frontier question just as the drive is a limit concept. Perhaps gender is a borderline state of sexuation which, while not excluding the phallus, aims to find arrangements for sexuation whose realizations can take place off-phallus (temporarily, or in a time of the cure where the phallus is not a place of the subject’s unconscious) but not without the phallus. This off-phallus, which is neither a time nor a space, is perhaps the equivalent of what is designated as the auxiliary ego in borderline clinical practice?

Gender does not challenge the phallus but questions its limit

as uncertainty, an uncertainty that limits the limiting effects of the psychic treatment of sexual matters. The phallus which marks what, from before it (primal?), persists in forms that we only encounter because they return, from time, from space, in the real or in regression.

 

Gender in psychoanalysis, first proposal for identification

On the occasion of the doctoral thesis “Gender clinic in psychoanalysis,” gender, sex, and sexuation were presented in their correspondences with the imaginary, symbolic, and real registers based on their quality as object, instance, and process. The result offers us the following coordinates:

	Imaginary	Symbolique	Réel
gender	object	process	impossible instance
Sex	instance	object	impossible process
Sexuation	process	instance	impossible object

 

 

Construction of the table:

The numbers indicate the chronological order of appearance of the elements during the research. Up to (3), these are elements emerging in clinical experience; (4), which is the first instance entered in the table, is deduced from (1), (2), and (3): it completes a first table. Then the table is extended to accommodate (5) as a logical necessity for theoretical elaborations this time. From (5), everything else was completed by pseudo-logical deduction. The whole remains to be verified.

 

	Imaginary (1)	Symbolic (2)	Real (5)
gender (1)	object (1)	process (3)	impossible instance (7)
Sex (2)	instance (4)	object (2)	impossible process (5)
Sexuation (6)	process (7)	instance (7)	impossible object (6)

Christian Centner

Can the question of gender be situated in relation to the Borromean knot32?

A question

The question around which my intervention will revolve would certainly not have occurred to me if I had not attended Vincent Bourseul’s thesis defense on September 27th33. This question, which concerns how the question of gender should be situated in relation to the Borromean knot, became clearer upon reading his thesis and following some exchanges I had with him, during which he shared his wish to bring the topological or Borromean aspects of his thesis work to discussion.

A first relationship between Vincent Bourseul’s work and the Borromean knot is not difficult to identify. Since the objective in his thesis is to provide a definition of gender that is compatible with its handling in psychoanalysis, one can expect that, to the extent he succeeds, he simultaneously establishes a relationship between gender, thus defined, and the three categories of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, as Lacan conceived them. It follows that he simultaneously establishes a relationship with the Borromean knot, of which Lacan maintained that its statement ek-sists in analytical practice, and that it is what allows it to be supported34. But this first relationship leaves open the question of how to situate gender in relation to this knot: Where? It goes without saying that I will not seek to answer this question in this presentation. At most, I will endeavor to indicate a line of work suggested to me by reading the thesis and which seems to present the interest, at least I hope, of fueling a possible discussion. To introduce this

presentation, I will begin by evoking two significant traits of the notion of gender as presented in this thesis.

According to Vincent Bourseul, the notion of gender “translates something of sex by highlighting the gap between the anatomical and the psychic, the genital and the social, assignment and affirmation35.” The question of gender appears when the classical benchmarks of sexual identity begin to weaken in their mission as holders of truth. It manifests through the indecision or vacillation of these benchmarks. It also appears when “something of sex must be the subject of a negotiation or an arrangement for the subject36.”

 

If I stick to these first indications, it seems permissible to me to draw a parallel between these manifestations of gender and what Lacan calls the questioning of the subject by the unconscious, which he mentions in “Preliminary Question,” or the question of “What am I there37?”, which also involves the vacillation of the benchmarks of sexual identity. For he indicates that this question interrogates the subject as to “his sex and his contingency in being, namely that he is man or woman on the one hand, and on the other hand that he might not be, the two conjugating their mystery and knotting it in the symbols of procreation and death38.” In this regard, we remember that Lacan pointed out that “the fact that the question of his existence bathes the subject, supports him, invades him, even tears him apart from all sides, is what the tensions, the suspensions, the fantasies that the analyst encounters, bear witness to39.”

At first glance, a parallel is possible between these tensions, these suspensions, these fantasies, and the effects of the loss of identificatory benchmarks that accompany the appearance of the question of gender as Vincent Bourseul describes it. But important differences also impose themselves. One of them, and not the least, allows us to grasp the first significant trait of the question of gender that I wanted to present here.

It stems from the fact that in the situations described by Vincent Bourseul, the vacillation the subject experiences regarding “his sex and his contingency in being” does not intervene only as a questioning of the subject by the unconscious, but also and much more manifestly in the conscious representation the subject gives of himself and his sexual identity. This is the case, for example, when it concerns people who

“experience living in a body sexed differently from the sex they feel,” or for people who wish to assume a sexual identity distinct from that which could be simply assimilated to the signifier “man” or the signifier “woman.” “Gender,” Vincent Bourseul also writes, “appears under the effect of the sexual; it interrogates the unconscious knowledge of sexual difference, and causes identifications to vacillate until their renewal.”

The question of gender can thus extend to an undertaking of self-recognition passing through the recognition of a newly created sexual identity. The subject must not only discover and assume this new identity but must also have it recognized in the surrounding social field. Considered from this angle, the question of gender appears as a symbolic process oriented toward the creation of a new identity and from which a progressive reinvestment of the body and language takes place.

 

The analysis of Marc, a young trans man who presents himself to Vincent Bourseul with a request for a space to think through such a transition journey, illustrates how the analyst is called upon in this transformation process. This is the case, for example, when “the imaginary of gender invites itself into him to give body—and therefore image—to the gender in the making of the analyzing subject40.”

Vincent Bourseul maintains in this regard that the handling of gender in the cure becomes a “vector of a rewriting of symbolic scope aimed at modifying sexuation as a symbolic instance, and thereby sex as a symbolic object in return, and thus the sexual identity of the subject. Gender undoes sex and creates sex, where the created sex is distinguished from the undone sex by being, for the former, that of the individual belonging to the species, and for the latter, that of the subject whom the cure aims to accomplish.” The proposition that “gender undoes sex and gender remakes sex” constitutes the second remarkable trait I wanted to evoke here: gender is both distinct from and linked to what pertains to sex and sexuation. And this is what led me to the line of work I will mention now.

A line of work

While reading Vincent Bourseul’s work, I remembered a passage from Seminar XXI Les non-dupes errent41 where Lacan situates the four so-called formulas of sexuation in relation to the Borromean knot. In particular, I remembered a property of this presentation: the manipulations that allowed Lacan to situate the four places corresponding to the formulas on a presentation of the knot simultaneously highlighted four other places with which he associated no writing. Could these four other places shed light on something regarding the question of gender?

 

Presented in three-dimensional space such that the three rings are arranged in three planes perpendicular to one another, a Borromean knot of three rings allows for the distinction of eight quadrants. Each quadrant is defined by being delimited by three ring segments, each corresponding to a quarter of one of the three rings. Considering the figure of the knot presented in this way, it is clear that it is possible to inscribe within the space described by this knot a cube, each vertex of which occupies one of the eight quadrants.

Starting from such a presentation, it is possible to obtain a flat presentation of the knot. For example, one can proceed as follows: one chooses one of the eight quadrants and pulls apart each of the three segments bordering it. The figure below shows the movement of such a flattening obtained from the quadrant located at the top right and in front in the figure above. In the figure below, an effort has been made to show the progressive deformation undergone by the inscribed cube due to the flattening movement.

Given that there are eight quadrants, there are eight ways to proceed with the flattening from a quadrant. By performing them one by one, it is easily observed that they differ by the orientation of the central part of the knot, or more precisely by the chirality: four are levorotatory and four are dextrorotatory.

Similarly, it is possible to observe that the four levorotatory presentations correspond to four vertices of the inscribed cube which themselves delimit a tetrahedron inscribed in this cube. Note that in the session of May 14, 1974, it is the explanation of this property that occasions the recourse to the orientation of the circles and their successive tilting. This result can just as well be obtained from the manipulation of a knot made of string or any other material. By either method, it is possible to establish that the tetrahedron corresponding to the four levorotatory flat presentations is inscribed in the following way in relation to the knot from which we started.

After having revealed this tetrahedral figure in relation to the knot presented in space, Lacan associates the four formulas—the “four options,” as he calls them—of sexed identification with the vertices of this tetrahedron. The fact remains that this latter operation leaves the other four vertices of the inscribed cube without any particular connotation.

Let us now note that the figures above also allow us to observe the deformation undergone, in the flattening movement, by the eight quadrants of the knot presented in space. The three segments delimiting the quadrant from which the flattening is obtained are transformed during the flattening into the three arcs that surround and delimit the field of the flat presentation. For each of the seven other quadrants, the three segments bordering it in three dimensions appear in the form of the three arcs bordering one of the seven triskelions of the flat presentation. Taking these correspondences into account, it is possible to locate, on the levorotatory presentation from which we started, the four vertices of the levorotatory tetrahedron in relation to which Lacan situates the formulas of sexuation.

We thus see that in the movement of applying the knot onto the surface, the vertex from which the flattening is obtained is applied to the central triskelion within which the intersection of three circles is delimited; the three other vertices are applied to the three triskelions delimiting the intersections of the circles in pairs. These four central triskelions of the levorotatory knot determine the portions of surface in which Lacan will inscribe the object small a, meaning, and the two jouissances, at the beginning of the seminar R.S.I.

A similar identification then allows for the location of the vertices of the dextrorotatory tetrahedron on this levorotatory presentation. As the geometry of the figure indicates, one of these vertices also corresponds to the central triskelion formed by the intersection of the three circles, while the three others correspond to the three triskelions bordering the presentation of the knot and within which no interaction between the consistencies is determined.

Could that which pertains to gender, insofar as it is both distinct from and linked to what pertains to sex and sexuation, be approached from what is at play in these four triskelions corresponding on this flat presentation to the four vertices of the dextrorotatory tetrahedron?

Annie Tardits

Lacan and the sexual: a few questions based on the clinical practice of gender42

 

 

I would first like to testify to an effect that reading Vincent Bourseul’s work had on my re-reading of the seminars where Lacan constructs the formulas of sexuation. While working, for last year’s colloquium, on the session of Seminar XI titled in the Seuil edition “Sexuality in the Defiles of the Signifier,” I had been struck by a kind of hiatus. After saying, in 1964 then, that what he has promoted until then concerning the unconscious puts him in a problematic position—the unconscious structured like a language apparently tears any grasp of the unconscious away from a goal of reality other than that of the constitution of the subject—Lacan delivers a new formula on “the reality of the unconscious”: “Let’s get to the point. The reality of the unconscious is—untenable truth—sexual reality. On every occasion Freud articulated it, if I may say so, mordicus. Why is it an untenable reality43?” Immediately, he follows up with what science teaches us that is new about sex considered in the finality of reproduction, that is to say, the survival of the species supported by the copulation of male and female individuals. Lacan then insists on sexual division at the cellular level. He evokes, without dwelling on them, secondary sexual characteristics and functions, referring the latter to the elementary structures of social functioning. He then notes the great difficulty in accessing the sexual reality of the unconscious and produces the internal eight to account for the void, a gap, between the lobe of the unconscious structured like a language and the lobe of sexual reality. Then he accounts, with Anna O.’s so-called hysterical pregnancy, for the weight of sexual reality inscribed in the transference… The hiatus between cellular division and Bertha Pappenheim’s little balloon leaves open the question of what pertains to the sexual for the subject.

I had this gap in mind when this summer, while reading Vincent’s work, I referred back to the seminar session where Lacan invites his listeners to read Stoller’s book, Sex and Gender44, devoted to “very well-observed” cases of a “very energetic desire to pass by all means to the other sex45.” The most striking thing was to read this preliminary remark that I had previously neglected: “[…] one does not pay attention to this, that I myself have not yet approached what pertains to this term, sexuality, sexual relationship46.” We are in 1971. Reading this sentence, I remembered a testimony from an analyst who was a student at the time of the 1953 split. In the troubled era of the SFP, and even after, some students and analysands, regular attendees of Lacan’s seminar, would ask quietly: but where has the sexuality that is at the heart of the Freudian discovery gone? There, in 1971, Lacan tells them that he hasn’t gotten to it yet. There, in 1971, Lacan invites us to distinguish the term sexuality as it is used in biology from the relationships between man and woman, “what is called sexual relationship47.”

It is therefore with Sex and Gender and this semantic remark that Lacan begins to elaborate a double question that will occupy him for four years: that of the sexuation of the subject and that of the sexual relationship… which does not exist. It is not forbidden to suppose that Stoller’s clinical work acted as a trigger for this questioning. Doubtless, he immediately places “gender identity48” in the dimension of the semblance, not unrelated to the parade of the “animal semblance.” But he emphasizes that human sexual behavior can be directed toward “some effect that would not be of the semblance. This means that, instead of having exquisite animal courtesy, it happens that humans rape a woman, or vice versa. At the limits of discourse, insofar as it strives to maintain the same semblance, there is from

time to time the real49.” The surgical transformation which, before the use of hormones, provided an outlet for trans desire—here I use a term absent at the time Lacan was speaking—is not the only acting out testifying that in the matter of the human sexual there is the real. Rape also testifies to it. We know its current effectiveness as a weapon in acts of war.

The clinical practice of gender that Vincent Bourseul proposes for discussion questions the use we can make of the formulas of sexuation. To speak of “creation of sex” in the journey of “gender transition” is something other than speaking of “declaration of sex” or of a “choice” between two sides of sexuation that would already be there, even if sexuation as a process does not exclude the instant of seeing an unconscious choice and a declaration that would constitute the moment to conclude.

In re-reading, with Vincent’s work, the seminars from the time when Lacan elaborates, then comments on, the formulas and the sexual relationship that does not exist, I was struck by certain remarks that resonate with “gender trouble50”: Lacan emphasizes that one cannot rely on experience to establish that in the human species one is man or woman. In February 1974, he tells this anecdote that someone has just reported to him: this person takes a taxi and it is impossible for them to know if it is a man or a woman driving; they ask the driver… who was unable to answer. And Lacan adds that “in a world neither made nor to be made, a totally enigmatic world […] it’s all over the place, isn’t it, all the same, it’s not nothing! It’s even where Freud starts51.”

[…] there is nothing more blurred than belonging to one of these sides […] that there be a male or female subject is a supposition that experience obviously renders untenable52.

If belonging to the male or female side is blurred for the subject, it is because “male” or “female” does not concern the subject. Lacan specifies:

 

[…] there is nothing that looks more like a masculine body than a feminine body if one knows how to look at a certain level, at the level of tissues. That doesn’t prevent an egg from not being a sperm, that it is there that the trick of sex lies. It is quite superfluous to point out that for the body, well, it can be ambiguous as in the case of the driver just now. It is quite superfluous because we see that what determines is not even a knowledge, it is a saying. It is not a knowledge because it is a logically inscribable saying53.

It is therefore in this blur of experience that Lacan’s attempt to ground in logic that there are two sides for the sexuation of the subject is based, not as male or female but as man or woman. The

“network of the sexual affair54” cannot be written in terms of male / female essence; it should be supported by another writing to be constructed from the relationship to sexual jouissance… the very one that supports, conditions, and justifies analytic discourse. Jouissance which is not just a matter of semblance—the little men and little women—nor just a matter of the real—the real of sex is its dual structure, the number two of the gametes, of the two small cells that do not resemble each other. In the dimension of jouissance, we see the dimension of the body emerging, though for a long time very discreetly: the way each person enjoys their body, the jouissance of two bodies enjoying each other. The taking into account of the body, of the embrace, Lacan links to the knot.

It seems to me that this dimension of the body remains muted in these seminars that elaborate the formulas of sexuation and the sexual relationship that does not exist. It is pregnant in gender transition; it is on the stage. If it were the scene of an acting out and its passion, would it say something about an unheard aspect of the body by psychoanalysis? Or about the difficulty of hearing what is at stake in the drive-driven body that Freud put forward to think of a perversely polymorphous human sexuality?

 

A final point that struck me in re-reading these seminar sessions with your work is the prominence, in Lacan’s elaboration, of a finality of sexual jouissance which is none other than copulation ensuring the survival of the species. The function of castration is what ensures this finality. This earns us this rather striking remark at the end of the session of February 3, 1972, at Sainte Anne. He has just spoken of the embarrassing side that the phallus has:

[…] a living being does not always know what to do with its organs. And after all, it is perhaps a particular case of the highlighting, by psychoanalytic discourse, of the embarrassing side that the phallus has.

That there is a correlate between this and what is fomented by speech, we can say nothing more about it […] in the current state of thought we have analytic discourse which, when one is willing to hear it for what it is, shows itself linked to a curious adaptation, because after all, if this story of castration is true, it means that in man, castration is the means of adaptation to survival. It is unthinkable but it is true. All this is perhaps only an artifice, an artifact of discourse. That this discourse, so skillful at completing the others, that this discourse sustains itself, is perhaps only a historical phase. The sexual life of ancient China will perhaps flourish again; it will have a certain number of pretty dirty ruins to swallow up before that happens55…

It seems to me that Christian Centner’s question joins this remark. At the very least, this reflection testifies to the fact that Lacan is sensitive to what is currently bursting forth with some unprecedented effects of science: for example, the scientific and technical offering of hormones introduces more trouble into the “network of the sexual affair” than the prowess of surgery (soon testosterone to boost female desire…).

 

After these remarks on the effect of your work in the reading we can make of the formulas, I would like to return closer to your clinical practice, in particular the handling of gender with Marc, with a question that your text has raised, and in particular your formula “gender undoes sex and creates sex.” I hear it thus: the sex that is undone is the sex to which, except in rare cases, the individual is assigned as a sexed living being at birth and which, as a general rule, is confirmed by legal registration and by discourse. It is the sex that can give rise to “gender identity” knotting the individual and the social. This gender identity leaves in the shadow the opacity of sexual jouissance as a relationship to the body, and what the subject can do with it. I read “created sex” as that which occurs in the subjectivation of the sexual or in the sexuation of the subject. I do not know if this reading suits you…

 

I recalled the hiatus encountered in Lacan in 1964 between sexuality which concerns, on the one hand, the individual and the survival of the species and, on the other hand, the subject as an effect of the signifier. The following year, Lacan emphasizes the necessity of strictly distinguishing the subject of the signifier from the biological individual56. This may account for the time it took him to approach the sexual relationship which concerns subjects. The groping, which I mentioned, of his elaboration testifies to this. Can speaking of the sexuation of the subject take into account that the parlêtre is also an individual, that they have

“a radical, real individuality,” a “vital immanence57”? Against the backdrop of these questions, your formula “gender undoes sex and creates sex” suddenly brought to mind an expression from 1966 that had never stopped me: in the note added to “Logical Time,” Lacan speaks of the subject of the individual: “the collective is nothing but the subject of the individual58.” It seems to me that the of in this formula is not consistent with the strict distinction between individual and subject. Reading you, reading in particular the case of Marc, I wondered if the creation of sex, of the sexed body that the subject will be able to recognize as their own, is a creation ex nihilo—or if it is done with something that remains of the undone sex of the individual, something that would allow for the knotting of the subject to the individual and for speaking of the subject of the individual. One is tempted to think of the object a, but we must not go too fast. I wondered if the moment of “crossing the formless” in Marc’s analysis, a crossing authorized by the presence of the analyst—voice and gaze—could shed light on this knotting of the subject to something of the individual. This question does not necessarily call for an immediate answer, but is an invitation to tell us about Marc.