A Psychoanalytic Reading of Transsexual Embodiment

Theories of transsexuality developed by cultural theorists tend to ignore the psychic dimension of subjectivity. This article draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, transsexual and transgender theory, and autobiographical narratives to reflect on what ought to be included in a psychoanalytically informed theory of transsexuality. Highlighting the work of Jay Prosser (1998), I discuss the importance of sexed embodiment, the problem of sociopolitical and biological reductionism, and the need to analyze, not to pathologize or to normalize, complex psychosexual processes. I suggest that the refusal to construct psychoanalysis and surgery as mutually exclusive constitutes the promise of recent clinical practice.     

Medieval Silence and Modern Transsexuality

Psychoanalysis and science respond to the transsexual claim of wrongful embodiment with radically different models of treatment. Yet both disciplines construct the figure of the transsexual from a heteronormative and patriarchal perspective. The 13th-century text Le Roman de Silence, which deals with the gender transformation of its heroine, Silence, is similarly biased. Moreover, this romance theorizes a relationship between gender and the body that closely parallels the psychoanalytical and scientific discourses about transsexuality. Silence's social isolation confirms the varying levels of dislocation that transsexed individuals, both male and female, attribute to their condition, but her powerlessness to determine her own gender identity is more akin to the modern treatment of intersex children. The ambiguity surrounding Silence's return to femininity at the end of the romance, however, suggests that the medieval author can see beyond the binary system of gender that structures his society and that continues to structure ours.     

Michelle Bachelet's Liderazgo Femenino (Feminine Leadership)

Evidence of military involvement in sexual exploitation and aggression against civilians on peacekeeping operations has led many feminists to question the appropriateness of using soldiers to create peace. They argue that the problems stem from a particular form of military masculinity, hegemonic within western militaries, associated with practices of strength, toughness and aggressive heterosexuality. Masculinities, however, are multiple, dynamic and contradictory. As they are constructed in relation to the contexts men find themselves in, involvement in peacekeeping may itself play a role in the construction of alternative military masculinities. Examining autobiographical accounts of soldiers involved in peacekeeping in Bosnia in the 1990s, I argue that there is evidence of an alternative discourse of ‘peacekeeper masculinity’, but question whether it fully challenges the hegemony of the warrior model. I acknowledge that peacekeeper masculinity is also problematic because although it disrupts elements of the traditional linkages between militarism and masculinity, it still relies on a feminized and racialized ‘Other’. Yet, I suggest that this is not the only way in which peacekeeper masculinity can be viewed. It can alternatively be considered part of a ‘regendered military’, which may be a necessary component of successful conflict resolution.     

The “diseased” activist's body as the site of trauma: Anti-racist struggles and the postrace academy

This paper is an autoethnographic account of the “racialized activist body” in the White academy and in tandem the bio-politics and bio-ethics of its right to be an affective body or to possess its senses against the trauma of anti-racist struggles in higher education institutions. The paper argues that in the postrace university, the “activist body” birthed through trauma becomes a conduit for the pain of others enacting it as a site for the deposition and transmutation of trauma in the quest for racial and social justice. It employs Bracha Ettinger’s notion of “matrixial borderspace” to examine the interplay of social relations between of the activist body and other traumatized subjects in the provision of care as an activist. Two narratives unfold in the paper fusing the articulations of the main text with the paratext to unleash the tumultuous psyche of the activist and her journey of voicing resistance in her anti-racist struggles. In the process, the activist body emerges as a “diseased site,” overloaded with the trauma of others, yet numbed in its inability to reconnect with its own corporeality and professional identity in its interface with White governmentality. The paper asserts that anti-racist struggles reassemble the activist body, tightly welding it with exhaustion which manifests in the pervasiveness of racial battle fatigue in the ivory tower.     

Sexual and gender identity work on social media

How do sexual and gender minorities use social media to express themselves and construct their identities? We discuss findings drawn from focus groups conducted with 17 sexual and gender minority social media users who shared their experiences of online harms. They include people with gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, asexual, non-binary, pansexual, poly, and kink (LGBTQ+) identities. We find that sexual and gender minorities face several challenges online, but that social media platforms provide important spaces for them to feel understood and accepted. We use Goffman's work to explore how sexual and gender minorities engage in ‘front region’ performances online as part of their identity work. We then turn to Hochschild's concepts of ‘feeling rules’ and ‘framing rules’ to argue that presentations of self, or front region performances, must include the role of feelings and how they are socially influenced to be understood.     

‘All in all it is just a judgement call’: issues surrounding sexual consent in young people’s heterosexual encounters

In the UK, there has been growing concern about young people’s understanding of sexual consent, with the views of young people themselves often lost in academic and educational policy debates. However, the focus on high rates of sexual violence has meant a lack of attention on the everyday negotiation of consensual heterosexual activity, leading to assumptions being made regarding young people’s lack of understanding of sexual consent. This paper emerges from a wider study of over 500 young people which sought to uncover their understanding of the issues. Drawing on data from workshops and the open text responses to an on-line survey the findings presented in this paper show that the majority of heterosexual young people understood the complexity of sexual consent as an embodied process, which can be difficult to define, talk about or practice uniformly. This complex understanding, in which sexual consent is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, has implications for sexual education initiatives. We argue that it is only by providing a closer understanding of how – within consensual sexual activities – young people understand and enact sexual consent through a range of embodied communication strategies that education surrounding sexual assault will become meaningful.     

Transgender,Hysteria, and the Other Sexual Difference: An Ettingerian Approach

This article uses the feminist-psychoanalytic scholarship of Bracha L. Ettinger to consider a relationship between the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of transgender (trans*). Both discourses struggle to articulate a dimension of being that lacks symbolization in the socio-Symbolic. My contention is that trans* subjectivity is metonymically linked to the discourse of the hysteric, and that both demographics are attuned to what Ettinger calls an Other Sexual Difference. Moreover, they are both writing something in excess of the phallic signifier that can, in Lacanian terms, circumscribe the man (as one) but not the woman (as not whole).     

Therapy with Transsexual Youth and Their Families: A Clinical Tool for Assessing Youth’s Readiness for Gender Transition

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care suggests a letter of recommendation be provided from a mental health professional if a transsexual desires hormone therapy or surgery. Therefore, transsexual clients have a unique dependence on therapists to obtain medical treatments needed to live life in their affirmed gender. Despite this need for therapeutic services, most therapists lack the training that is necessary to sensitively serve transsexual clients, particularly transsexual youth. While a published clinical assessment tool exists for therapists to determine readiness of adult transsexual clients for medical gender transition, no similar tool is available for therapists working with transsexual youth. This article discusses therapeutic issues specific to transsexual youth and families and presents a clinical assessment tool for determining transsexual youth’s readiness for medical treatments.     

Disgusted subjects: the making of middle-class identities

Although the classed dimensions of ‘taste’ have, following Bourdieu, been widely discussed, expressions of disgust at perceived violations of taste have been less frequently considered in relation to class. This paper considers various expressions of disgust at white working‐class existence and explores what they might tell us about middle‐class identities and identifications. I argue that the narratives of decline and of lack present in such representations can be seen in terms of a long‐standing middle‐class project of distinguishing itself. Drawing on Bourdieu's critique of Kantian aesthetics, I argue that the ownership of ‘taste’ is understood as reflecting true humanity, and as conferring uniqueness. Ironically, however, this uniqueness is only achieved through an incorporation of collective, classed understandings. The paper calls for a problematization of a normative and normalized middle‐class location that is, I argue, given added legitimacy by a perceived decline in the significance of class itself. [A]n account of class, rank or social hierarchy must be thin indeed unless accompanied by an account of the passions and sentiments that sustain it (William Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, p. 245). Social identity lies in difference, and difference is asserted against what is closest, which represents the greatest threat (Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 479). What we read as objective class divisions are produced and maintained by the middle class in the minutiae of everyday practice, as judgements of culture are put into effect (Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, p. 118).     

“I Will Have Lacked”: Rethinking Sexual Difference and Sexed Subjectivity Through Psychoanalytic Temporal Relationality

ABSTRACT

Sexual difference, as understood by contemporary Lacanian scholars, is the Real that marks a constitutive gap or discord beneath the construction of sexual identity, but in what way does the Real relate to the Symbolic in a process of becoming a sexed subject? This article explores the possibility of sexual differentiation through a psychoanalytic conceptualization of temporal organization and rearrangement. Taking the moment of the “primal view” in Freud’s text as its point of departure, this article demonstrates that the origin of sexual difference in psychoanalysis is actually a temporal difference between two processes of becoming, explained by Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and Lacan’s future anterior, respectively. In comparison with women’s time, it is argued that the Lacanian temporal relationality promotes a new epistemology of sexed subjectivity that permits an expanded understanding of the lived experience of being sexed.     

Negotiating the Edge: The Rationalization of Sexual Risk Taking Among Western Male Sex Tourists to Thailand

Every year thousands of Western men travel to Thailand as sex tourists to participate in paid-for sex. Although many of these men will use condoms to protect themselves against sexually transmitted infections (STIs), others will not, despite the risks. By applying Steven Lyng’s (1990) concept of edgework to data collected from 14 face-to-face interviews with male sex tourists in Pattaya, Thailand, and 1,237 online discussion board posts, this article explores the ways in which these men understood and sought to rationalize the sexual risks they took. We argue that notions of likelihood of infection and significance of consequence underpin these behaviors, and we identify the existence of understandings of sexual risk that reject mainstream safer-sex messages and frame condomless sex as a broadly safe activity for heterosexual men. The article concludes by summarizing the difficulties inherent in driving behavior change among this group of men, for whom sexual risks appear to be easily rationalized away as either inconsequential or irrelevant.     

BOURDIEU'S CONCEPT OF REFLEXIVITY AS METALITERACY

For Bourdieu, the extent to which agents can attain knowledge of, and negotiate, various cultural fields is dependent upon, and explicable in terms of, two epistemological types. The first is a practical sense (the ‘logic of practice’), while the second involves a sort of conscious comprehension that he names ‘reflexivity’. Bourdieu defines reflexivity as an interrogation of the three types of limitations (of social position, of field and of the scholastic point of view) that are constitutive of knowledge itself. But the reflexive relation to the habitus, the demands and influences exerted by cultural fields, and one's own practices within those fields, cannot be understood simply as something that is obtained by the subject; rather, any reflexive relation to the doxa and illusio of the field must be a constitutive part of that field. This paper identifies a number of principles taken from Bourdieu's work that clarify how, where and why the reflexive ‘surpassing’ of literacy might occur. But we also suggest, contra Bourdieu, that only fields that are informed or characterized by the scholastic point of view are likely to be characterized by the set of conditions constitutive of reflexive knowledge; and that the scholastic point of view is therefore, simultaneously, both a potential impediment to, and a condition (almost necessary) of the production of reflexive knowledge.     

Coming Out Disabled: A Transsexual Woman Considers Queer Contributions to Living with Disability

The author provides an autobiographical illustration of the similarities in coming out lesbian, transsexual, bisexual, or gay and taking visible steps to address a previously invisible disability. The essay begins with a comparison of personal experiences of transsexuality and invisible disability, and addresses the advantages of applying the coming out model to the author's disability. The author concludes that coming out is a process model that disabled individuals can use to aid a transition to caring for a new or worsening personal disability.     

War and security,women and gender: an overview of the issues

This article addresses the gender division of war and the significance of men and masculinity in processes of militarisation. Three phases of the continuum of war are considered. In periods of war-readiness, societies see a diversion of spending from social provision to the armed forces, accompanied by an increase in patriarchal ideology and authority. The actual waging of wars calls for the delivery of extreme but disciplined violence, and combat training shapes masculinity to this purpose. Armed conflict often involves a massive sexual assault on women. Women have recently intervened internationally to argue that if peace is to be more than a mere cessation of hostilities, ‘security’ must be redefined to mean the satisfaction of human needs, including comprehensive safety for women. Women's peace movements, worldwide, are theorising that gender power relations are significant among the causes of war, and transformative change in how we ‘live’ gender can be a significnt resource for peace.     

From spoils to weapons: framing wartime sexual violence

The way an issue is ‘framed’ (viewed and understood) has a profound effect on whether it is viewed as a priority for action by international organisations, states, and civil society. Wartime sexual violence used to be framed as a ‘women's issue’, but since the issue gained widespread notoriety in the mid-1990s, it has shifted to being understood as a ‘security issue’. Activists and campaigners have used this as an opportunity to press for more attention at international and national levels, and policymakers have given higher priority to the issue of ending wartime sexual violence. Yet framing wartime sexual violence in terms of security – and in particular, a focus on ‘rape as a weapon’ – comes at a cost. First, it isolates this violence conceptually from the wider context of gender-based violence before, during, and after active armed conflict, and other types of violence may receive little attention. In addition, the specific emphasis on ‘rape as a weapon’ affects the types of wartime sexual violence recognised and condemned by the international community, the kinds of ‘victims’ granted assistance, and the extent to which women and men are perceived as victims, empowered agents, or perpetrators.     

A Comprehensive Approach to the Treatment of Gender Dysphoria

After a brief historical review of the clinical management of gender dysphoria, the authors argue for a comprehensive treatment model that recognizes a wide spectrum of gender identity disorders. This treatment model explores the meaning of a gender dysphoric individual's desire for sex reassignment in the context of the individual's biography and psychosociosexual adjustment. Unlike previous treatment approaches, this model makes no attempt to identify the 'true' transsexual. The model's treatment tasks are: assessment, management of comorbid psychiatric disorders, facilitation of identity formation, sexual identity management, and aftercare. The implications of this treatment model for classification and ethical standards of care are discussed.     

Schizocapital and the branding of American psychosis

Abstract

This essay reads Deleuze and Guattari's Anti‐Oedipus, somewhat perversely, as a radical Lacanian means of conceptualizing hypermodern capitalism. If, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is psychoanalysis that rediscovers and retraces the death instinct in classical, nineteenth‐century capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis better exemplifies the ways in which the deterritorializing flows of twenty‐frrst‐century global capitalism have overcoded and overwritten that classical, nineteenth‐century order of things. Taking Bret Easton Ellis's novel, American Psycho as its symptomatic text, this essay discusses the implications, raised hysterically in the novel, of an unrestricted economy in which the ‘subject’ is no longer held in place by a governing (master or paternal) signifier in relation to a traditional symbolic order. The essay shows how Lacan's notion of ‘the Other’ has been reconfigured, in relation to consumer capitalism, such that it takes the form of a purely machinic imperative that turns the subject into an economically dividuated producing/product. The subject has become a little machine hooked up to the big machine that maintains it in debt in a continual process of consumption‐production of commodities, brands and identities.     

Moving from Urban Sociology to the Sociology of the City

The American Sociologist - Castell’s claim that urban sociology has no subject matter has yet to be refuted. In this article, I argue that urban sociology should be understood as the...     

How Sexual Identities Change: Pragmatism,Habit, and Creativity in the ‘Situation’ of the Lascivious Costume Ball

How do individuals’ sexual identities, in the sense of who they are as sexual beings, change? Research addressing this question in the modern U.S. setting points to several factors, including macrolevel societal transformations, vernacular culture, interpersonal interactions, psychodynamics, and life course transitions. Yet it is less clear how these diverse factors are configured in broader social processes. This article draws on and extends the pragmatist mechanism-based approach to social theory to illuminate a key causal pathway whereby individuals’ sexual identities may change. I argue that habits, specifically taken-for-granted ways of doing and thinking about sexuality, are a crucial constituent of sexual identities. But when individuals encounter problem situations to which existing habits are inadequate responses, they are more likely to do and think about sexuality creatively. Incorporation of these creative responses into stocks of habits can readily encompass shifts in sexual identities. The argument is illustrated using people’s dramatic reflections on the first three iterations of the Lascivious Costume Ball, a sexuality-themed party that occurred at the University of Chicago. The Ball dramatized the radical historical moment of the Sixties and functioned as an exceptional problem situation for all but three of my respondents. The utility of the theory centers on its capacity to (1) generate more precise explanations of how individuals’ sexual identities change; (2) integrate distinct literatures on sexual identity into a carefully generalizable theory of individual change; and (3) highlight a crucial relational dimension of certain problem situations.     

Fragile goddesses: moral subjectivity and militarized agencies in female guerrilla diaries and memoirs

Kurdish female guerrillas in the armed political organization Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) established death as the ultimate form of agentive transcendence in the early periods of their participation. This article focuses on the uneasy relation between death and empowerment in female militancy. It explores how female militancy both unsettles and reinforces gendered binaries of militarism. In parallel, it looks at empowerment as a fragile and complex process connected to lived experiences and subject-making mechanisms within insurgent organizations. It analyzes Kurdish female guerrillas’ diaries, memoirs and author’s interview with an ex-guerrilla on the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state in the 1990s. The autobiographical narratives reveal the formation of a transcendental ethos on female empowerment culminated in the goddess image. Yet, the narratives also reveal the dilemmas, contradictions and pain inherent in becoming ideal militant-subjects, particularly for female guerrillas. Through this exploration, I argue that such model of a posthumous empowerment dominates the ways in which women’s militancies are recognized and understood.