Deconstructing difference: Gender, splitting, and transitional space.

Abstract

n an early session, Elizabeth, then 43 years old, held back her tears because, she said, "1 don't want to cry on your shoulder." When I questioned her reluctance, she replied that the danger lay in the shoulder, not in the crying: I want to understand Elizabeth's reply by thinking about gender not as an She would cry only on a man's shoulder; she was not interested in women. essence but as a set of relations (May, 1986) and to propose that at the heart of gender is not "masculinity" or "feminity" but the difference between them. My thinking is located in two interesting contexts: feminist and psychoanalytic. The first may be described as the critique of gender, a phrase whose ambiguity is deliberate. I mean to suggest, simultaneously, gender as critiqued and gender as critique, gender as a concept that not only requires scrutiny but also can itself illuminate other matters. Reciprocally, understanding gender depends on the second, psychoanalytic context of this chapter, framed here in terms of splitting and transitional space, concepts themselves capable of furthering the clinical relevance of the critique of gender. I am using the concept of "splitting" loosely, signifying in its psychoanalytic sense both splitting of the ego and splitting of the object (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, pp. 427, 430) and in its cultural sense the many dichotomies and dualism paradigmatic in Western thinking since Descartes and of critical relevance to feminist discourse. The doubledcritique of gender I am proposing can, by defamiliarizing the emotion-and value-laden notions of femininity and masculinity, help to peel away what we think gender is (and believe it to be) from what it might be. When I speak thus of gender's possibility, I refer to the present, not the future. Deconstructing gender in our minds can help us stretch our clinical imagination about what our patients' inner worlds are like and, indeed, could be like.

Oedipus in Brooklyn: Reading Freud on Women, Watching Lena Dunham’sGirls

“…Dimen () proposes that gender can become a psychic repository—less a “determinate category” than “something resembling a force field” (p. 335)—that organizes self‐experience. Harris's (, ) contributions are a comprehensive cross disciplinary statement on the social construction of gender that explore the processes through which gender unfolds in the individual as an idiosyncratic collation of psychic and social influences.…”

The body one has and the body one is: Understanding the transsexual’s need to be seen

“…Additionally, it is also important to incorporate into our analytic formulations the systemic cultural forces that frame the experience and expression of sexuality and gender (Benjamin, 1998; Dimen, 1991; Goldner, 1991, 2011; Harris, 1991; 2011; Suchet, 2011) so as to challenge more simplistic equations of biological sex, gender and sexual desire (Butler, 1998, 2003; Foucault, 1976). Approaching transsexuality thus requires a wide‐angled lens so as to formulate the interpersonal, intrapsychic and systemic processes that give rise to a highly idiosyncratic experience of the child’s gendered embodiment.…”

Listening to the Erotic Commentary on Paper by Eric Sherman

“…Like gender itself, masculine (homo)erotics can be understood as constituted through a process of splitting, whereby various attributes of masculinity, derived from the "force field" of gender (Dimen, 1991), are exaggerated, eroticized, and performed. Desire between men is haunted by hegemonic masculinity and the gender relations that govern it.…”