Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis

New Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Max Belkin, Cleonie White, Max Belkin, Cleonie White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000028539
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Sexuality examines the links between race, gender, and sexuality through the dual perspectives of relational psychoanalysis and the theory of intersectionality.

This anthology discusses the ways in which clinicians and patients inadvertently reproduce experiences of privilege and marginalization in the consulting room. Focusing particularly on the experiences of immigrants, women of color, sex workers, and LGBTQ individuals, the contributing authors explore how similarities and differences between the patient's and analyst's gender, race, and sexual orientation can be acknowledged, challenged, and negotiated. Combining intersectional theory with relational psychoanalytic thought, the authors introduce a number of thought-provoking clinical vignettes to suggest how adopting an intersectional approach can help us navigate the space between pathology and difference in psychotherapy.

By bringing together these new psychoanalytically-informed perspectives on clinical work with minority and marginalized individuals, Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis makes an important contribution to psychoanalysis, psychology, and social work.

Part I

Queer identities

Chapter 1

Who is queer around here?

Overcoming rigid thinking and relating in patient and analyst

Max Belkin

“Who Are You?”

One day, a couple of months into my work with a Mexican-American graduate student named Ana, I casually inquired about her reactions to me. First, she offered her usual “I am glad that you share my background in philosophy and can understand me.” But then I heard something new and baffling: “I had to stop watching House of Cards recently,” added Ana with an anxious laugh. “Kevin Spacey looks too much like you. I mean, like you, he acts straight, even though he is totally gay.” Taken aback, I asked Ana, “Are you wondering whether I am gay or straight?” To my surprise, instead of saying something reassuring and deferential, which used to be her habit, Ana continued: “When I googled you before our first session, I found out that you are from Russia, that you are Jewish and gay. But now I read you as a white, privileged straight man. I don’t hear your accent. When I tried telling you about my campy side, like RuPaul’s Drag Race being my favorite show, you were dismissive and condescending. I don’t know what to make of you anymore.”

Now it was my turn to feel confused and frustrated. Suddenly I heard my own indignant internal voice: “How dare this straight woman pontificate whether or not I am gay enough! This is preposterous.” I took another incredulous look at Ana and thought to myself: “Do I know you? I don’t believe that I have met this woman before. Has she been here all along?”

Queer theory

A few weeks following this exchange, upon entering the waiting room to greet Ana, I found her immersed in reading White Girls (2013) by Hilton Als. Ana inquired whether I had already read it, and after learning that I had not, told me to check it out. While embracing his own black queerness, Als at the same time challenges the binary, essentialist categorization of people as black or white, gay or straight, male or female. For example, the author refers to his bi-gendered best friend as “SL” (Sir or Lady). “Since America is nothing if not about categories” (p. 12), Als and his friends struggle to subvert and transcend the narratives and stereotypes that justify and maintain their marginalization.

As I was reading Als’s thoughtful analysis of the ubiquitous oppression of women, gays, and people of color, I was wondering about the impact of racial, gender, and sexual orientation differences between me and Ana on our ability to understand and empathize with each other. What does being homosexual, gay, or queer mean to her and to me? In what ways am I not “gay enough” for her?

At first, I became defensive. I get uncomfortable whenever a straight person raises questions about my sexual orientation. It makes me feel objectified, vulnerable, judged. According to Michel Foucault (1990), since the end of the nineteenth century there has been a marked proliferation of medical, legal, and religious discourses about homosexuality as an immutable and dangerous pathology that allegedly invades every corner of the homosexual’s personality. Furthermore, viewing homosexuals as a separate group has been a powerful weapon of discrimination and persecution. Unfortunately, more than one hundred years later, in the words of Jack Drescher (2007), “homosexual” still remains “a medical term – usually with pejorative connotations – that takes one aspect of a person’s identity, his or her sexual attractions, and treats it as if it were the sum of the person’s entire identity” (p. 207).

Inspired by feminism and the gay liberation movement, several philosophers and literary scholars (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1990; Sedgwick, 1993) have challenged the discourses and practices that pathologize sexual minorities. As a result, a new academic discipline, queer theory, was born. The word “queer” means across as in “across genders, across sexualities” (Sedgwick, 1993). By exploring people’s sexual identifications in historical and cultural contexts, queer theory treats all sexual identities as socially constructed and contingent, rather than immutable. In fact, according to Siobhan Sommerville (2000), “ ‘queer’ may be understood as pointedly critiquing notions of stable lesbian and gay (or ‘straight’) identification” (p. 6).

In addition to describing one’s sexual identity, queer can also be a playful, subversive performance of difference, at once personal and political. The popular Pride Parade slogan: “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used to It!” demands respect and equal rights for all. As Mark Blechner (2009) points out, “queerness is not about a particular form of sexuality; it is about an attitude – an attitude of acceptance” (p. 159). Thus, the word that used to serve the oppression of sexual minorities has been rehabilitated to affirm and celebrate them.

The meaning of queer depends on the interpersonal context in which it is being used. Whenever LGBTQ people call themselves queer (whether tongue-in-cheek or as a matter of fact), the implied connotation is usually one of pride and respect. And this kind of affirmation tends to employ the first person: “I am queer,” “I am coming out,” or “I will survive!” (Sedgwick, 1993, 2003). However, when straight people describe an LGBTQ individual as queer, the intention is not always clear or benign. It is similar to the difference between stating “I am a Jew” and the experience of being called a Jew by somebody else. For instance, had Ana wondered out loud whether I am “Jewish enough,” that would have also made me uncomfortable.

Ana and I explored what queer meant to each of us, the parallels and tensions between her sexual identity and mine. Although same-sex eroticism initially formed the core of the term “queer,” it has since transcended the limits of any given sexual orientation or sexual identity. According to Sedgwick (1993), “many people of varying sexual practices, too, enjoy incorrigibly absorbing imaginative, artistic, intellectual, and affective lives that have been richly nourished by queer energies – and that are savagely diminished when the queerness of those energies is trashed or disavowed” (p. 20).

Although the meaning of queer keeps shifting and remains elusive, its epistemologic and political agenda is clear: to deconstruct and debunk any one-sided, monolithic definitions of who we are as subjects and objects of erotic desire. While heterosexual and homosexual, gay and straight are binary categories, queerness occupies the transitional, metaphorical space between them. Refusing to be pigeon-holed or typecast, Hilton Als (2013) repeatedly insists throughout his book that “metaphors sustain us.”

In retrospect, I view Ana’s question about my gayness as an invitation to be queer together: to transcend the rigid binary categories of homosexual and heterosexual, white versus person of color, male or female, to create new meanings and possibilities for each other. In fact, this question seemed important not only to our work together, but also to my own personal and professional growth. One of the benefits of being a therapist is that our work forces us to confront our limitations and blind spots. Both patient and analyst can only access their dissociated parts via participating in jointly created enactments and by examining their personal contributions to them (Stern, 2010).

Articulating and exploring the differences and similarities between me and Ana seemed not only important, but also fraught. According to Russell Meares (1993), “the therapist’s state of mind should resemble that to which the patient’s should be moving” (p. 184). Unfortunately, that is easier said than done. Acknowledging and accepting the vulnerable, shame-laced aspects of one’s self is not for the faint of heart; we keep them outside of our conscious awareness for a reason (Bromberg, 1998; Stern, 2003). In particular, a psychoanalytic inquiry into Ana’s and my own experience of privilege and marginalization required a nuanced examination of the interplay among gender, sexual orientation, and race.

Intersections among sexual orientation, gender, and race

Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall (2013) describe intersectional studies as context-specific inquiries into legal, economic, and other kinds of discrimination facing women of color and sexual minorities. These authors view intersectionality as an analytic approach to social issues. For them:

What makes an analysis intersectional – whatever its field or discipline – is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. This framing – conceiving of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power – emphasizes what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is.

(p. 795)

Since the 1980s, Crenshaw (1989, 1991), a prominent legal scholar and activist, has made important contributions to both feminism and critical race theory by focusing on the intersection of sexism and racism in the professional and personal lives of women of color in the United States. For example, in 1989, Crenshaw critiqued the existing antidiscrimination law for its failure to recognize the cumulative effects of gender- and race-based oppression on working African-American women. In particular, the law viewed black claimants as similar either to black men or to white women, thus overlooking black women’s particular experience of marginalization. In contrast, Crenshaw’s intersectional analysis of legal cases of work discrimination revealed that many black women had been excluded from the workforce “both as women who are Black and as Blacks who are women (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013, p. 790).” Over the past thirty years, Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality inspired a broad movement against gender, racial, and sexual discrimination in the workplace, housing, and the legal system (Verloo, 2013; Spade, 2013).

Building on the critical psychoanalytic inquiry into gender and sexual orientation, Adrienne Harris (Corbett, Dimen, Goldner, & Harris, 2014) suggests that we expand the “queering of psychoanalysis” by examining the intersections of race, gender, and culture in the consulting room. Many gay and lesbian studies focus on gender and sexuality while at the same time downplaying the role of race (Collins, 2005). Although queer communities value inclusiveness, just like society at large, they also struggle with racial divisions and stereotypes. For example, Hilton Als (2013) reports that for many black gays and lesbians, queerness itself reads like a form of whiteness. In addition to homophobia, black gays and lesbians also face racial oppression and prejudice (and sometimes at the hands of white gays and lesbians).

At the same time, research on race and ethnicity often overlooks issues around sexuality, and especially homosexuality (Sommerville, 2000). By contrast, contemporary intersectional scholarship examines how race, gender, and sexuality might mutually construct one another in historically situated social practices (Collins, 2008). The intersectional approach to gender, race, and sexuality as historically and culturally contingent markers of identity has opened the door to exploring how our notions of heterosexuality and homosexuality, masculinity and femininity might inform and be shaped by our shifting representations of race.

In the nineteenth century, prominent American and European sexologists, such as Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, viewed homosexuals as sexual “inverts” who reversed traditional sexual roles (Sommerville, 2000). To describe “inverts” as a discrete sexual group, nineteenth-century sexologists employed the methods of scientific racism, the so-called American School of Anthropology, that maintained the myth of white superiority over other races. Guided by the erroneous belief that anatomy can predict intelligence and behavior, American sexologists and anthropologists developed a hierarchy of human beings that relegated African-Americans, all women, and homosexuals to inferior positions.

In Somerville’s account (2000), the bodies of black women and lesbians became the primary sites of medical inquiry into racial and sexual differences. According to the prevailing anthropologic and sexologic views of that time, women’s genitalia and reproductive anatomy reflected the “natural” racial and sexual hierarchies. Therefore, many case studies published in nineteenth-century medical journals included physical examinations conducted by comparative anatomists who claimed that both African-American women and white lesbians were endowed with unusually large clitorises. This “genital excess” supposedly invoked male anatomy, thus indicating that both lesbians and African-American women were allegedly less sexually differentiated than their white heterosexual counterparts. At the same time, few case studies focused on the genitals of heterosexual African-American men or white homosexuals.

According to Sommerville (2000), the first quarter of the twentieth century saw a gradual decline in the popularity of both the biologic model of racial difference as well as the notion of homosexuality as a sexual inversion. However, they were replaced by the infamous cultural myth about black rapists who desire white women and the concept of homosexuality based on the “abnormal” sexual object choice. In Somerville’s reading, “racial and sexual discourses converged in psychological models that understood ‘unnatural’ desire as perversion: in these cases, interracial and same-sex sexuality became analogous within later conceptions of sexual object choice” (p. 37).

The invitation to view race, gender, and sexuality as fluid and intersecting markers of difference simultaneously poses serious challenges to scholars and psychoanalysts alike. In the words of Muriel Dimen (2011), “in the clinic, all these map onto each other, winding under and over and through each other like superhighways in a vertiginous sequence of clove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Queer identities
• Part II Sexual exploitation of women
• Part III Immigrant experiences
• Part IV Clinical theory
• Index