Gender, Sexuality and Subjectivity

A Lacanian Perspective on Identity, Language and Queer Theory

Duane Rousselle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000068009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Offering a concise yet comprehensive introduction to gender theory, this thought-provoking new book aims to make an intervention into the contemporary American paradigm of thinking gender and sexuality and offers a powerful challenge to the paradigm of social constructionism.

Within each gender paradigm there are unacknowledged truths. The controversial claim of this book is that queer theory and intersectionality – and, more broadly, the social constructionist paradigm – have reached a limit. Indeed, it is possible that they are becoming regressive political gestures. However, there are possibilities of moving forward in this new area of transformation and Rousselle claims that a new logic of gender invention is opening up a new paradigm of thought.

Part of the popular Routledge Focus on Mental Health series, this book will be of immense value to students and teachers who aim to understand in a basic way some of the various main paradigms, theories, and concepts within gender and sexuality studies. It will also be an important attempt to think beyond those paradigms and theories.

1
Gender meta-theory

An in(ter)vention

The field known as ‘meta-ethics’ is not without its short-comings. However, its general project has been to force the discovery of truths implicit within established normative discourses. This is the profound invention of meta-ethics and the key for understanding its significance as a paradigm of thought. It is probably for this reason that meta-ethicists have proclaimed for themselves a “second-order” designation, while retroactively establishing normative ethics as restrictive and merely of the “first order” (see Mackie, 1977). Within the field of ethical philosophy, this also implies that meta-ethicists have unearthed a domain of inquiry that counts. Indeed, it is by counting to the second-order, or, in other words, by counting to ‘two,’ that one moves also toward the revelation of truths dormant but nonetheless determinative within normative declarations.

It is not therefore that meta-ethicists are situated somehow beyond normative ethics, and it is not as if they have surpassed the hegemonic discourse that determines them. Rather it is that meta-ethical discourses are located at the disjuncture of ethical normativity itself, by thereby revealing underlying taken-for-granted paradigmatic assumptions. Normative statements concerning the ‘good’ and/or ‘evil’ does not at all concern us because we as meta-ethicists aim to operate within the broader domain that interrogates these presuppositions by posing the following question: “whence arrive the epistemological and ontological justifications for statements concerning the ‘good’ and ‘evil’” (see Rousselle, 2012)? It is only by asking this question that we step into the field of meta-ethics and it is only in this sense that we can claim that it involves an operation that opens up a novel discourse of the ‘two.’ Yes, meta-ethics is an operation that counts to ‘two.’ But it does not count any further.

The successful implementation of an operation that counts to ‘three’ requires a fundamentally different sort of invention. To count to three does not mean that one counts using the sort of logic of the “count-as-one” described by Alain Badiou ([1988] 2013), or the logic of “succession” outlined by Gottlob Frege (1960). Rather, to count to three requires the invention of another dimension of thinking, and moreover, it implies the invention of a dimension of thinking already presupposed within the restrictive conditions established by preceding truths. For this reason, I cannot claim, as I did in the past, that this is a book of meta-ethics (see Rousselle, 2012). Or, to be more precise, I cannot claim that this book is exclusively meta-ethical. The problem is that few of the American gender theorists – the canon of which has largely been constituted from outside sources – have learned to count beyond two, to three and/or four; and those who have are not at all aware of the profound truths that they have unearthed (much less are they aware of the various subject formations that arise as a consequence of those truth procedures).

It is through reflexive gestures (through already established paradigmatic assumptions) that serious interventions might be mapped – specifically by mapping the various truth productions and inventions. This is how we can make gender theory count again. Such an approach necessitates topological considerations that help us to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of gender theory today – or, to be more precise, since we are working now within topology: it is non-orientable, and this makes it beyond identity, language, and even beyond the queer. While working through the material that served as the support for this book, it became obvious to me that my approach – charting the dominant paradigms, theories, and concepts of gender studies – was too flat. At this point I was faced with a decision: to incorporate more material in order to satisfy the university discourse (which forever insists upon adding more and more excluded elements into a consistent and comprehensive narrative) or else to cut through university discourse, refusing its demands, by making a real intervention. Consequently, the approach of the scholar no longer cut it for me.

Inevitably, the following problem surfaced: progressive gender theories sometimes appeared to me to be regressive, and vice versa. The only way forward was to consider the ostensibly absurd possibility that my chart should be understood as a surface akin to a sheet of paper. This surface might be vectorized and the short edge twisted one hundred and eighty degrees and reattached to the other short edge. A continuous non-orientable surface was invented, which accounted for the possible movement from progressive to regressive or reactionary gender politics. I aimed to be cautious and wary of the temptation to repeat past paradigmatic comforts without also moving hastily into the new hysterical comforts of politically correct identity politics and moral posturing, which today produces a vacuum within leftist circles. Therefore, I propose to adapt Karl Marx’s popular statement from his “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” which originally read “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice: he forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” (Marx, 1852): in the field of gender studies, victory occurs first as progress and then as regress and reaction.

It is within the context of this discovery that invention becomes exposed as a fundamental category of truth. Indeed, this book was an invention. What began as an experiment in American pedagogy (for courses in the sociology of gender and sexuality at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan) resulted in the invention of a new teaching strategy. Scribbles upon a few sheets of paper – various formulae, charts, diagrams, and so on – were placed upon the podium in front of me. American students are a product of the discourse that compels them, and that discourse is none other than the ‘capitalist discourse,’ the new, fifth, master discourse discovered by Jacques Lacan (see Rousselle, 2019). It is a discourse that demands modules, slides, pre-established chunks of knowledge designed only for the purposes of plugging up the anxiety of thinking. It is a demand that is instigated by an environment which exemplifies pragmatist ideology, and which mutates the traditional discourse of the university (ibid.). I invented a new teaching method – oriented by scribbles – as an attempt to frustrate these demands.

It was this frustration of demand that moved me toward an obscure interrogation of gender studies, toward an examination of the broad tendency of theory itself. It is at this level that I entered what the American sociologist George Ritzer has named “meta-theory” (Ritzer, 2007). It is the word ‘paradigm,’ by which I mean to describe the zone in which unconscious presuppositions develop into theoretical orientations, that nonetheless introduces further confusion: what is a meta-theory and how is it different from a paradigm? Any discussion of meta-theory must be connected to a discussion of its paradigmatic assumptions, and this is missing (and yet most encouraged) in most meta-theoretical analyses. There I stood in front of American students, with the demands of capitalist discourse – with its incredible sense of urgency and its movement from one ‘chunk’ of knowledge to another so as to reduce theory only to its “cash-value” (Rousselle, 2019) – and I offered an obstacle or a barrier: an obscure silence laced with topological significance.

The anxiety of thinking produced in me stuttering and stammering, and there, within the classroom, I often fell silent. But this is precisely the antidote to the chaos of capitalist discourse. It was my aim to demonstrate to these students the profound anxiety of thinking, the likes of which were once described by Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote that “learning to be anxious so as not to be ruined either by never having been in anxiety or by sinking into it,…whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate” (Kierkegaard, 2015). This saving virtue one learns courageously, as an appropriate subject formation vis-à-vis truth. Capitalist university discourse does not entirely destroy the possibility of adopting this courageous subject formation, although that is what it certainly intends to do.

I wish therefore to thank those students who refused to flee from the anxiety of thinking, and who received, whether they were aware of it or not, the reward of invention. Together we crossed the Rubicon that separates the real and the body of knowledge that intends to govern it, and if only for the moment, we demonstrated that within the urgency of the capitalist university, it is indeed possible to burst the bubble that separates the classroom from the rest of the world.

References

• Badiou, Alain. [1988] (2013) Being & Event (Oliver Feltham, Trans.). London: Bloomsbury Books.
• Frege, Gottleb. (1960) The Foundations of Arithmetic: A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number (J. L. Austin, Trans.). New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Kierkegaard, Søren. (2015) “Anxiety as Saving through Faith,” in The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin. New York, NY: Liveright.
• Mackie, John L. (1977) Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. New York: Penguin Books.
• Marx, Karl. (1852) “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” As Retrieved on May 29th, 2019 from <www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/>
• Ritzer, George. (2007) “Metatheory,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Wiley Online Library.
• Rousselle, Duane. (2012) After Post-Anarchism. San Francisco, CA: Repartee Books.
• Rousselle, Duane. (2019) Jacques Lacan and American Sociology: Be Wary of the Image. London, England: Palgrave Books.

2
Theory as an antidote to chaos

Theory orients us within the labyrinth of the social world by situating our naïve taken-for-granted assumptions within an appropriate symbolic apparatus. A distinction, then: theory must be distinguished to some extent from its underlying paradigmatic framework. Whereas paradigms consist of raw unconscious presuppositions, theory merely attempts to navigate and map the terrain of those same presuppositions. This is why we might relate this definition of a paradigm to that of the ‘symbolic unconscious’ described at length by members of the World Association of Psychoanalysis. At the center of the Freudian discovery, as its fundamental truth production, there was for a long time an exploration of the symbolic unconscious: the unconscious must be interpreted, deciphered, or translated into a meaningful system of signifiers, a coherent and consistent body of knowledge or a narrative concerning the social environment.

The work of theory is often to reveal latent signifiers which, when taken together, constitute our apparently spontaneous opinions or clusters of knowledge. These opinions or knowledges in turn move us and orient us in our social environments. From this perspective, then, a body (any body whatsoever) is formed as a meaningful body, a textured body, as a body inscribed by signifiers. The body is a zone of signification. Thus, the body, when viewed from within the social constructionist paradigm, is always one that is constructed from the raw materials of language, and this is what constitutes the cornerstone of the social constructionist paradigm within sociology. Yet this approach avoids another altogether more provocative possibility: the ‘real unconscious,’ which confronts us as a body of confusions, ambiguities, obscurities, rather than the fleeting comforts of meaningful explanations.

A paradigm is related to the symbolic unconscious such that if one thinks that something is true, that it is beyond debate, or if one holds an unshakable conviction, then one is all the more operating within the set of those unacknowledged paradigmatic assumptions. The more obvious an explanation given by an individual seems to be to us, the more anchored it is to an underlying paradigmatic presupposition. For example, there is the often repeated ‘go-to’ answer held by people that gender is simply equivalent to sex and that it has everything to do with our innate biological constitution. This is one of the key paradigmatic assumptions: gender is sex is biology. This position has the virtue of making matters simple so that we do not have to engage with the confusions or inconveniences of real sexuality or gender. If we affirm this position, we also have the advantage of simply moving on with our lives, of moving forward in our everyday discussions without having to be bogged down by the anxieties of careful reflection.

Within contemporary American society, there is the following paradigmatic assumption: the world is out there, external to the individual, and it is an intelligible or meaningful world. Thus, that world can be understood empirically, objectively. The role of the sociologist or ‘social scientist’ is to somehow see the world for what it really is, without any ideological distortions or bias. We often expect from the sociologist the same attitude that we expect from the American news network Fox News: a ‘no spin’ zone, a world free of bias, a world of cold facts. And yet, precisely when one presents oneself as being situated within the no spin zone, one becomes all the more susceptible to accusations of bias. Why? On the one hand, we are supposed to remove our biases, step outside of our ideologies, detach ourselves from our prejudices, and just be attentive to the world as it is; yet on the other hand, whenever we do this we end up having to entertain the possibility proposed by Kellyanne Conway during her Meet the Press interview in early 2017: there are “alternative facts,” a world where “facts are not facts.”

It is as if we are trying to remove the various distortions that stand in between us and our ascertaining of the social world, between us and reality, between the ‘fake news’ and the truth. In other words, even the political left today – the harbingers of the ‘social constructionist’ paradigm within popular culture – seem to want a no spin version of the social world. We imagine that ideology consists of something like a pair of sunglasses that distorts one’s vision of the social world, and yet as Slavoj Zizek correctly claimed many years ago, ideology exists precisely when we take off the sunglasses (Zizek, 2013). We therefore have to reverse our way of thinking: it is only when we put on the sunglasses of theory – the supposedly distorting lenses of ...