Sexual Difference in Debate

Bodies, Desires, and Fictions

Leticia Glocer Fiorini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429919022
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The greater part of this book focuses on a critical analysis of the logics and ways of thinking supporting both explicit and implicit theories of sexual difference and the masculine/feminine pair. These theories may be private or collective; conscious, preconscious, or unconscious. They impact heavily on interpretations and constructions made in analytic practice, while they also affect transference-countertransference patterns. This conceptual analysis reviews the Freudian oeuvre as well as the work of other significant authors, post-Freudian and contemporary, that have contributed specifically to this topic. The concept of sexual difference contains a persistent problem: binary, dichotomous thinking and its blind spots and aporias. For this reason, the author has turned to other epistemologies that offer novel forms to think about the same problems, such as the paradigm of hyper-complexity, as well as thinking at intersections and limits between different categories.

Part I
Masculine–Feminine

Chapter One
A transdisciplinary view with intradisciplinary effects

Discourses and narratives

Figures and counter-figures of the feminine and masculine extend throughout the history of civilisation and culture and their diverse subcultures. Difference between the sexes was and is conceptualised in different ways in the course of history, in different societies, disciplines, and theories, although their points in common are also worthy of note. Social, cultural, biomedical, and technological changes in recent decades (the “new families”, assisted fertilisation, virtual sex, and sex change surgeries) update questions posed since Antiquity that induce us to rethink the notion of sexual difference. This is accelerated by the vertiginous development of phenomena of globalisation, communication, and informatics.

In A History of Women in the West, Duby and Perrot (1994) bring up a singular and suggestive point when they question whether there is really a history of women and how they relate to thought concerning sexual difference. In their opinion, there is development and mutation in the evolution of thinking about the difference between the sexes that has been affecting Western culture since the Greeks. This thinking oscillates between figures—Athenian, Baroque—of mixtures such as the androgyne, the hermaphrodite, the transvestite, part of one in the other made possible, and classically reassuring figures with radical differences: two species with their own characteristics, objects of intuitive recognition more than scientific knowledge.

Confrontation with sexual difference has traditionally situated in the feminine a condition of emptiness and silence that requires deciphering. This silence is connected to theories on the feminine based on notions of castration and lack, which respond to a concept of negativity that deeply marks these conceptions.

The feminine was always thought of in negative terms, either by devaluation or by placing it in the range of the unrepresentable. In other words, the feminine appears as something foreign and, as such, is idealised or devalued, or alternatively considered outside language and the symbolic order. This aspect heavily permeates fantasies about women and locates them as the other of a masculine subject. It is one of the strongest and most frequent versions of sexual difference. It produces inevitable intradisciplinary effects in the psychoanalytic field.

Making the feminine position the equivalent of otherness refers again to the opposition between culture and nature, an opposition upholding a notion that runs through all times: women are indissolubly linked to the biological order and nature, and men to culture and reason. That is to say that the rational corresponds to men and the emotional to women.

The idea of the woman as a weak, incomplete and inferior being or, alternatively, as incarnating demonic sexual temptation, pervades centuries of history. It may be found in religious, philosophical, and medical discourses, as well as in myths and customs, and psychoanalysis is not immune to the power of these discourses.

We see some of these aspects in the misogyny of Biblical texts, in which the woman appears either as a devalued being or as a sorceress and source of threatening sexuality. Eve, with her incitement to sin through temptation/seduction, exemplifies these versions since her position inviting to sin coincides with her devaluation, precisely due to this very position.

In the Middle Ages, the figure of “the witch” amply demonstrates malignant and ominous aspects linked to the feminine which, with apparently more benevolent connotations, stands even today. This is the counterfigure of the mother-woman, pure and idealised. In this line, idealisation of the mother-woman tends to emphasise the mainly reproductive, natural–biological “destiny” of women, which tends to ignore that maternity is a symbolic and symbolising function. This includes disavowal of any female sexuality expressed beyond maternity, which is interpreted as threatening and dangerous.

As we have pointed out (Glocer Fiorini, 2001a), we may legitimately ask why it is that witches were persecuted women whereas wizards were always respected and venerated wise men. We know that witches were women who lived away from constituted families and were generally dedicated to the art of healing. For Sáez (1979), they were persecuted because they placed themselves outside cultural and social expectations for women. Harris (1989) maintains that the reigning powers in the Middle Ages displaced the struggles of those who rebelled against them onto the witches, in order to disorganise these movements and to decentre the target from the nobility onto the witches. Harris points out that, more than persecuting witches, they created them by torture.

We also recall that only in the fifteenth century, at the Council of Trent, did the Catholic Church decide that women had a soul.

We also find that the equivalence between the feminine and the other, the latter generally with malignant and dangerous characteristics, is found in other cultures. In some primitive peoples and religions, menstruating women were excluded because of their impurity and presumed maleficent influences. Others held ceremonies in which wives were burned alive with their dead husbands. The practice of sacrifice linked to the notion of the sacred is observed to be intimately connected with relations between men and women and their conceptualisations in accepted discourses.

Israël (1979) recalls Hippocrates, who describes uterine migrations—the uterus displaced onto the brain—in relation to hysterical symptoms. These displacements evoke an American Indian myth of the Murias, the legend of “vaginas with teeth” that emerge at harvest time and, when captured by the men, are divested of their teeth, returned to their place, and nailed in with the clitoral nail. This author considers this myth the translation of a fantasy of fear of women, which in turn evokes the clitoral resection effected on pubertal Muslim girls, among other reasons as a way to control their sexual enjoyment. As Israël points out, this practice responds to two factors: one is that female organs are interpreted as devouring, and the other is that these male fantasies translate anxiety, fear or resentment in regard to hysteria and women in general. These two reasons are related. They are myths and theories with powerful effects on conceptions of sexual difference. Klein (1945), with her proposal of the fantasy of the “vagina with teeth”, updated this myth.

Nineteenth-century medicine based female inferiority on assumedly scientific facts. Bouillaud (1836) maintained that the uterus was not an essential organ in women because it did not exist in men.

This type of analogical thought, applied in different disciplines, reveals the condition of otherness assigned to women by a male investigating subject who analyses his object of study. In this line, we may also view polygamy as another way to objectify women, thereby situating them as an other to be possessed.

The field of philosophy, with few exceptions, has assigned women a secondary and devalued place. As is generally known, Plato (1895) doubted whether to include women in the category of rational animals or that of brutes, and Aristotelian conceptions maintained that the male body was the form and woman’s was the formless. Erasmus (1922), in his The Praise of Folly, considered women similar to stupid and mad animals. Rousseau (1998) confined women to domestic tasks. Schopenhauer’s statement (2007) on the intelligence of women as being related to the length of their hair is famous. Spinoza (1981) wondered whether women could sustain an ethical position. Aristophanes (2004), in Lysistrata, illustrated ideas in vogue in antiquity regarding women as being unpredictable, mad, inferior beings, although he also evidenced their capacities to avoid wars promoted by men. That is to say that he also described an active and questioning aspect, represented by Antigone, who rebels against the ruling powers that prohibited her from mourning her dead brother (Sophocles, 2004).

It is equally necessary to revise anthropological descriptions referring to women as possessions of the father and then of the husband (Lévi-Strauss, 1969) when these reports are accepted as decontextualised and ahistorical axioms. Other myths about the threatening and dangerous woman, described by Freud in Medusa’s Head (1940c), as well as narratives about the idealised mother-woman versus the prostitute also support these positions. We also observe them in folk knowledge and in stereotypes accepted even today such as the figure of the Don Juan, involved in endless desire, or the mother-woman who gives priority to love over desire.

In other scenarios, the industrial revolution in England produced an enormous expansion of work for women that subsequently burgeoned with the two great wars of the twentieth century, when the men went to the front and women’s work became indispensable. In 1789, the French Revolution propounded three great principles: equality, fraternity, and liberty. However, the philosopher Celia Amorós (1985) maintained that the French Revolution did not grant women the status as subjects that could make these principles their own. In the same way, postmodern proposals of dissolution of the subject touch on this empty place in the female condition. That is to say that the subject was being deconstructed when women had, for the most part, not yet reached the status of subjects.

Other important changes also occurred in relation to this topic, such as the emergence and spread of contraceptives in the mid-twentieth century. Their use dissociated sexuality from reproduction. This modification was deepened by the introduction of new reproductive techniques. Maternity is no longer the only destiny possible for women. There is no doubt that we are referring to the Western world and to certain social strata. Of course, in other cultures and subcultures, we encounter different problems that approximate classical and traditional ideas regarding the place of masculine–feminine dualistic positions.

In recent decades, discourses on sexual difference became more complex with the increased visibility of diverse sexual and gender presentations, interpellating the classical concept of sexual difference. This fact challenges fixed and clear-cut notions regarding the feminine and the masculine, men and women. In this context, Foucault (1980) wondered whether “there is a truth about sex”, in reference to the case of Herculine Barbin, whose hermaphroditism led those around him/her to impose a sexed position and a “true” identity that he/she was unable to accept, with the result that he/she led a life darkened by melancholy until it ended in suicide.

The reader may ask us our reasons for presenting this introductory view when we could start out directly with psychoanalytic concepts. We consider it indispensable to contextualise theories on “difference”, since their relation to social discourse is at the nucleus of the matter. Contradictory discourses with respect to sexual difference suffuse the history of culture; for example, especially since the nineteenth century, different variants of feminism coexist with frankly androcentric discourses. Also within psychoanalysis and gender theory itself, we find contradictory discourses.

All the contextual points we are reviewing are indispensable because no discipline that works with these themes may declare itself immune to accepted discourses, established norms, and meanings that extend throughout the history of civilisation. These categories regarding difference, as Fox Keller (1994) points out, are included in language.

They are related to two points we discuss in the course of this study.

First, the aporia and blind spots to which binary thinking leads, from which the masculine–feminine pair is not exempt. This occurs in reference to sexual difference both in certain aspects of psychoanalysis, which are our topic, and also in other disciplines. David-Ménard (1997) underscored these aporia and impasses in the field of philosophy. Here, we emphasise that dualisms, even though they are part of language, lead to dead ends if they cannot be incorporated into larger complexities.

Second, conceptions that consider everything referring to the feminine position and to women as an enigma. Therefore, binary thinking and the feminine as enigma are one of the axes of our discussion concerning difference.

Freud did not escape the predominant ideas of his age when he described feminine characteristics: little sense of justice, the predominance of envy in psychic life, a weakly formed superego, psychic rigidity after age thirty, weaker social interests, lower capacity for sublimation. Although he also remarked that it is not always easy to distinguish what can be attributed to the influence of the sexual function and what to social domestication (Freud, 1933a).

We also recall that this thinking exists in a context in which two conceptions on sexual difference coexist today in the field of culture. On the one hand, two strictly differentiated spaces are defined: masculine and feminine, heavily accentuated in illustrated modernity, which support a radical difference. On the other hand, accompanying the turn of the century, a multiplicity of sexual and gender variants appear which interpellate those concepts of modernity on sexual difference. These sexual migrations that accompany the phenomenon of postmodernity (for some, late modernity, for others hyper-modernity) organise narratives that acquire special resonance in view of their increased social acceptance in the context of globalisation and also in the light of advances in biotechnology and the burgeoning development of communications media.

This challenges the classical mode of relating feminine and masculine categories with women and men, something Freud had already anticipated in some aspects of his earliest works when he introduces the notion of bisexuality and the concept of the complete Oedipus complex (Freud, 1923b). This theory involves taking into consideration the complexity of processes of construction of sexed subjectivity.

In this regard, we need to emphasise that this phenomenon is not only a contemporary product, since at many other times the classical binarism of the sexual difference has been challenged. There is a nearly infinite list of processes of mixtures, transformations and identifications between masculine and feminine (Zolla, 1981) that accompany the history of culture. We will mention the double beings described by Plato as existing in the ancient world before the Greeks, of which there were three types: man-woman (the classical androgynous), man-man and woman-woman. These beings, separated as punishment by Zeus, were consequently seeking their other half. The most highly valued double beings were man-man, an attempt to include homosexuality, which enjoyed great social and cultural importance in ancient Greece, especially between men. We also recall the Greek myths of Hermaphrodite, Caenis and Caeneus, and Tyresias, as well as some versions in which Narcissus is alternatively a man or a woman, among others (Méantis, 1964).

Among shamans, phenomena of trance and transformation into the other sex were common. The lamas identified with their female gods in hallucinations. Similar experiences are described in Tantrism, Taoism, and Buddhism. In Hindu metaphysics, the polarity of being, represented by Shiva and Shakti, becomes pure unity on a higher plane and melts in the androgynous Ardhanarisvara. It is also interesting to note the frequent presence of mixed figures, such as female Christs or those in an attitude of breastfeeding in iconographies of the Middle Ages. Zolla (1981) also points out that in songs of mystical love throughout the world, the poet loses consciousness and wails like a woman. This tradition ranges from Siberian shamans to Chinese Taoist poets, through Iran, Arabia, and Provence to Florentine poets of the Dolce Stilnovo, who referred to themselves as “women”.

As we said, the two tendencies we mentioned coexist in the present: the strict separation of sexes accentuated in Modernity and sexual variants brought in by postmodernity. They are part of the consensus of meanings of an age that support a set of practices and social relations. However, even though these sexual and gender variants tend to erase the strict masculine–feminine polarity, they have not substantially modified the permanence of the ancestral equivalence between the feminine, otherness, and enigma, in spite of changes in the female condition in important social strata in the West. Both factors cohabit in contemporary societies.

In the field of literature, in essay, we also find rigorous analyses regarding the position of women in Western societies. De Beauvoir’s (1989) The Second Sex describes the woman’s position of otherness. Virginia Woolf illuminates the frequent localisation of the woman as an object of study in a masculine world. In A Room of One’s Own (1929) she refers pointedly to cultural and social inequalities in regard to women, and in Orlando (1928) to indefiniteness of identity and sex.

In sum, both the field of sexual diversities as well as ruling conceptions regarding women and the feminine challenge the concept of sexual difference.

This overview allows us to contextualise and historicise our approach from the perspective of psychoanalysis, taking into account its basic axes: the concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and transference, while at the same time considering the various interpretations of these categories offered by the different theories that constitute the psychoanalytic field.

Chapter Two
The sexed subject and current realities—their impact on conceptualisations of sexual difference

More than a hundred years ago, at the end of the nineteenth century, a fundamental work began to take shape with Freud, a work that has marked several generations of psychoanalysts in the Western world throughout the twentieth century.

At the outset of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in a different world, marked by a vertiginous devaluation of ideals that individualised the first half of the twentieth century (including gender ideals), powerful development of informatics and technology, and renewed expressions of social, ethnic, and religious violence. These variables in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: MASCULINE-FEMININE
• PART II: ITINERANT SEXUALITIES
• PART III: SEXUAL DIFFERENCE—TOWARDS A POSSIBLE DECONSTRUCTION
• REFERENCES
• INDEX