Commentary on González

Gender with Sexuality as Fluid and as Fixed

In his essay, González insists that we keep sexuality and gender in “complex stratification[s]” (p. 60). Might we also say: imbricated, intersectionally engaged, softly assembled? González wants us to see, through a close reading of Sullivan’s diaries, that desire and identification are always interwoven and co-constructed in ways perhaps discernible, but also unpredictable. The way gender and sexuality will develop in any individual is emergent from forces both interpersonal and intrapsychic. While this is mercifully and creatively true, and González makes a strong and intricate case for seeing the productive and unpredictable interweave of gender and desire, I find myself still wanting to keep a space for the constitutive force of social construction. However complex the lived conscious and unconscious experience of being both a sexual being and gendered, the cultural demands for performance in this process persist. One can see in this argument the continuing and trenchant work of Jacqueline Rose (2016, 2018) and in feminist and queer psychoanalytic theorizing in recent decades (e.g., Dimen 2003; Dimen and Goldner 2007; Layton 2004; Benjamin 1988, 2004; Corbett 2009). This literature insists on both the impressive cultural and institutional production of gender/sexual difference and the suffering that ensues from social pressures. In thinking about both contemporary and historical work on the engagement and intertwining of gender with sexuality, we need to maintain this tension between the force of social construction and the psychoanalytic inflection of the complexity and wildness in the living out of sexual, gendered, raced, and cultured life. The social-constructive forces in regard to gender and sexuality bite deeply into psychic and unconscious life. At the same time, as González here so forcefully argues, there are always creative, transgressive, unruly engagements of excitement and desire, always interactively engaged with uniquely and unpredictably imagined bodies and genders.

The experience of reading this essay made me miss anew the voice and critical presence of Ruth Stein (2008). Stein’s work, strongly influenced by Laplanche (1999, 2015), insists on the irreducible excess, the deep contradictions in sexual experience. These ways of seeing desire’s creative and unsettling force is what González wants to keep in tension with the more socially pressured construction of gender. González asks us to listen and frame Sullivan’s narratives with a very complex theorizing grid that keeps sexuality and gender in easy and uneasy tension. In the diaries we see Sullivan struggle with the limits and the potential transformations of these limits over a long history of pain and pleasure, collapse and regeneration. I found myself thinking of Stein’s admonitions that we never lose sight of the excess in sexuality. In particular, Stein imagines a complex role for shame in relation to sexuality. Sexual experience, in its inevitable excess, produces shame and yet, in the engagement with intensity, somehow manages to master and dissolve shame. Avgi Saketopoulou, in this issue and elsewhere (2014a,b), has developed this perspective in new ways to consider perversion and consent, with implications for both development and the clinical experience of transference and countertransference.

In thinking of gender and sexuality as “polyvalent,” that is, distinct and yet interpenetrating, González invites us into a new consideration of après-coup, of the endless rewriting of one’s personal history, or reconfiguring and retranslating, to bring in Laplanche’s language (1997, 1999, 2015). In this essay, González also locates his subject and us in actual history, in the complex transformations of sexual and identificatory life in the 1960s and onward, and in the catastrophe of AIDS beginning in the late 1980s. This is clinical work seen in its intrapsychic, its social, and its historical locations.

From Prosser’s work (1998), González brings in the concept of interpellation, the ordering of narratives about origins and identity and desire that arrive from the state (in its local manifestations), but actually quite differentially in different historical periods and locales. Interpellation, a term that originally came from Althusser (1971) and political theory, proposes that messages arrive from the state, which might be in the form of police, parents, one’s cohort, or the media. You feel addressed: “Hey you!” the cop shouts (Žižek [1989] famously used this example); in startled compliance one is shamed into conformity, even to the point of intense conviction that you are as you are conscripted to be. Shame and guilt do the work of enforcement. We clearly need a concept like intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989) to interweave with interpellation, to see the complex elisions, refusal, and polyvalence as we interweave gender, race, class, cultural forms, and desires/sexuality.

I want to bring into this discussion the work of two important, often underappreciated figures from the history of gender and sexuality studies: Anne Fausto-Sterling and Ray Birdwhistell. Each of them, from different fields of study and vantage points, noted the ways in which gender difference is forced into oppositional characteristics by cultural tropes. Birdwhistell (1970), the founder of the study of kinesics, focused on movement, posture, and bodily style, calling phenomena like gait, stance, posture, and movement tertiary sex characteristics. Birdwhistell saw that movement always carries significant social information. A teacher of Erving Goffman and a colleague of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, he moved in an intellectual world where the social was seen to infuse many processes more usually viewed as purely embodied and somehow distinct from the symbolic. Birdwhistell saw tertiary sex characteristics as processes that call into question the rigid binary of gender difference. At the level of the body, he insisted, there is a strong overlap across the genders. Essentially, Birdwhistell argued that it is learned behavior and culturally proscribed experiences that concretize the sharp gender divide.

González engages us with these ideas at the very beginning of his essay as he recounts his experience—dizzying, destabilizing, transforming—of watching a transgender dancer move. The orderly and ordinary function of movement to organize desire and identity (which Birdwhistell is theorizing) is actually disrupted in the dance. Right at the moment of potential policing of difference, the categories transmute, destabilizing the viewer. González calls this “the ricochet of gender” (p. 60). As he also goes on to notice, the mutative experience of gendered desires, in unpredictable combinations, is triggered by experiences, by movements, by music that tie the observer and the observed. Ordering forces are put to the work of disorder.

I have also found Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) a useful presence in thinking about historical movement and gender/sex complexity. Drawing on history, biology, and gender studies, Fausto-Sterling shows both the fierceness and the falseness of the constructions of polarized sexed bodies. While we are accustomed to considering the variegations of gendered experience, we tend to hold on to the sexed body as a more solid phenomenon organized irreducibly as one or the other pole of a dichotomy.

A student of the history of medicine, Fausto-Sterling speaks to the confusions of biology and social construction in relation to sex/gender differences. She notes that categories of experience that involve the body are seen, inevitably, under the dominating imprimatur of evolutionary biology. She argues, from evidence across natural and social science fields, against this warring opposition of culture and biology, an opposition that can be the source of quite contradictory claims and assertions. For example, Fausto-Sterling has written about historically long-standing legal and medical preoccupations with keeping genitals in an orderly and tidy binary. These are as much obsessions as preoccupations, she argues, powered more by cultural anxieties and the demand for social regulation than by medical necessity, anatomical accuracy, or patient care. Sexuality and gender are best thought of as lying in complex multidimensional spaces, with much more indeterminacy and overlap between gendered sexed bodies than we are comfortable thinking about.

These are complex social and political matters. To counter the lethal effects of pathologization, in which psychoanalysis has certainly been complicit, there has been for some decades now a strong imperative not to craft a developmental story. If we can think of gender misrecognition as trauma (Saketopoulou 2014a), can we think of the wide variety of developmental and psychic functions served by gender and sexuality without a tilt into the pathologizing narratives of the past? If not, we leave gender and sexuality outside of psychoanalytic inquiry, which I believe is too costly a move.

Fluidity and fixity need to be held in tension. González brings us a fascinating coordination of personal diary writing with writing on gender and desire, and of the interweaving of these inscriptions. Lou Sullivan was working with a barely articulable palette and set of descriptors. We can read backwards to see these categorical complexities. She/he was inventing body, mind, and desire, not only in their unique integrations but in a particular historical period, one spanning, as it turns out, an extraordinary era: sometimes constrained and silencing and repressive, then potent, productive and provocative, and, finally, tragic.

Sociocultural Effects And History: Linked But Different

What González’s use of Sullivan’s diaries allows us to see is not only the social, always imbricated and productively co-creating with body, biology, internal desire, and character, but also the fact that these mixtures, born in sites of hope and despair, will always be historically particular. The social is itself always an historical phenomenon; Sullivan’s particular story is set in the second half of the twentieth century. His life unfolds over a long trajectory of social change and sharp transformation. She, then Sheila, grows up in wartime and then postwar America, a time when possibilities for women were greatly restricted. The adult women in Sullivan’s childhood would have been part of the generation sent back to domestic labor to create jobs for returning veterans. Lou emerges in young adulthood amid the explosive transformation of the 1960s and 1970s, a period of powerful expansion of identity, self-reference, and social/sexual life.

We must imaginatively engage with this aspect of the story, as well as with the intricate and mutating experiences of identity and desire that Sullivan lived through. Perhaps we might think of these historical shifts as effecting a kind of intergenerational transmission of power and possibility along with loss and refusal. Christine Maksimowicz (2017) has written about the complex class-based communication between mother and daughter that constrains movement and potency. At the same time, a poignant aspect of Sullivan’s story is the degree to which she/he struggled in the early years, in conditions of solitude. The diaries are the holder and the frame of these early struggles in order that they come into being. The solitude/isolation in “otherness” is a potent feature in González’s account.

The material González draws on in this discussion of the polyvalence of gender, its encounter with and transformation of, against, and for sexuality, is also an account located in a particular history. González gives this history its due, noting that Lou/Sheila begins in a secret practice of diary writing. I notice, even as I write, that not only do pronouns evolve and shift but so do names: she, he, Sheila, Lou, even Sullivan. González has given us, through the diaries, the stories and his theorizing, a complex and unique narrative.

One outcome we might hope for in the complexity of this developmental arc—from preadolescent girl to gay man in midlife dying of AIDS—is a greater collective sensitivity to difference. Trans narratives sometimes suffer from the requirement of an orthodoxy and order that becomes a requirement of suitability for surgeries and other medical needs. These of course vary by personal circumstance, developmental level, and the individual’s desired or intended outcome. But the social/medical/legal demands may also constrain and shape the wide individuality of lived experience, hopes, and intentions. Writing gender into sexuality, as González is charging us to do, produces an account of unpredictability and emergence in a context of creativity and coercion.

Models of Complexity For Subjectivity

In 2009, when I published Gender as Soft Assembly, I felt the rush and excitement of insights and ideas I had not expected when I began to work on gender from a psychoanalytic perspective (Harris 2005). Trained as a developmental psychologist, I was grounded first in the more linear models of Piaget (1924), later in the more dialectical models of Vygotsky (1963), and finally in nonlinear dynamic systems (NDS or chaos theory) as a developmental model that struck me as exquisitely relevant, both to psychoanalytic studies of development and to theories and models of analytic action, particularly where intersubjective and intrapsychic processes unfold and interact.

Now, over a decade later, one sees the presence of NDS (aka complexity theory or chaos theory) in a wide range of theoretical approaches (see, e.g., Galatzer-Levy 2016). In a recent lecture, Galatzer-Levy (2018) has made a strong case for considering the presence and function of boundaries in psychoanalytic technique and theory as following a fractal organization. The presence of fractals as the site of boundaries creates conditions of emergence and ambiguity. Fractals, products of post-1970 mathematical theorizing, allow for complexity by facilitating and creating space for a range of surfaces in which complexity is played out.

The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, in search of a theory of such surfaces, developed the concept of fractals, mathematical objects that are infinitely complex in the sense that no matter how much they are magnified, they reveal layers of structure that are themselves complex rather than being simple, smooth curves. An astounding feature of fractals is that they are easily defined but produce arbitrarily complicated forms and structures. “Fractals,” Galatzer-Levy notes,

which are often of extraordinary beauty, occur in many natural situations. Fractal structures are evident in speech and the structure of psychoanalytic sessions.

The structure of a fractal has two important features particularly relevant to a discussion of psychoanalytic boundaries. First, as . . . one grows closer to the fractal itself it is less and less predictable on which side of the boundary one will find oneself. The boundary becomes literally infinitely complex. The difference between being inside or outside becomes a matter of tiny differences in the positions of points. If being inside or outside matters, which it very often does, these tiny differences still make a huge difference in what happens [2018].

A point Galatzer-Levy stresses is that phenomena are at their most complex and ambiguous right at the boundary’s edge. An interesting perspective on gender boundaries and gender ambiguities thus opens up. The experience that González has watching the transgender dancer Sean Dorsey might aptly be described as an experience at the moment of fractal disturbance and complexity, right at the site of a boundary.

Lou Sullivan’s trajectory—as gender morphs from she to he, as desire may be shaped and transformed by the changing experience (conscious and unconscious) of genderedness—is highly particular. The crossroads at which desire and identity, body and psyche, meet is particular for this person. Surely this is so for all of us.

Might the concept of fractals be a help here? Thinking of the various binaries, permeable and fixed/sharp in the light of fractals, we would see something both unique and paradoxical. Fractals are not only sufficient to provide an account of the complexity of phenomena like desire and gender; they can actually transform how in psychoanalysis we talk about boundaries. Their complexity is deep and continuous. As boundary phenomena, they render sameness and difference inherently unstable. Thinking of gender and sexual difference as fractal-like might help us understand experience as always containing both fluidity and fixity. The boundary, considered as fractal, is ambiguous and unstable right at its most acute and particular.

A related concept, one perhaps more familiar to psychoanalysts, is caesura, useful to Bionians and neo-Bionians, particularly Civitarese (2008). Elements of this perspective can be found in Bion’s alpha-function (1962), in Laplanche’s enigmatic messages and translations (1997), in the Barangers’ work (1961–1962, 2009), and in other South American analysts’ use of the spiral as a model of development, both macro and micro.

In 2017 this journal published a paper by Griffin Hansbury on the fantasies and bodily awareness of interiority and vaginal experience in men. (The themes in Hansbury’s paper echo an earlier one by Fogel [1998] on interiority in men.) In Hansbury’s paper and in the commentaries that follow, the complex question of fantasy and reality is engaged. Must a firm line be drawn between the two? Here is where Galatzer-Levy’s discussion of fractals might help. Could we perhaps see the fantasy/reality boundary as constituted as a fractal, and so as ambiguous, unstable, and complex? In thinking about fantasy and reality, might we need more layers between them, a need we are discovering in thinking about the relation between symbolization and unmentalized experience? González’s approach opens us to these possibilities. Again, the concept of caesura (Bion 1977) may help, a concept that maintains distinctions and overlappings, continuities and discontinuities, always in tandem, and the paradoxical engagement of same and different.

These are not solely tools with which to unpack Lou Sullivan’s unique history. I want us to see each of our histories through Sullivan’s history, with all its shifting pronouns, body-scapes, love stories, and free-range sexual life. The movement and variability at conscious and unconscious levels in human identifications and desires need as wide and voluminous a theoretical apparatus as possible to take in its complexity. Our psychoanalytic theories, even ones that seem so fixed and unimodal—with one kind of gender and one kind of sexuality—are actually replete with theoretical space in which complexity thrives. Identifications usually contain both adherence and difference. There is psychic volatility around desire and identifications built into psychoanalytic theory from its origins onward.

The women analysts of the 1920s often theorized the trajectory of female desire via activity (Harris 2005). Lampl–de Groot (1933) and Josine Muller (1932), among other, less well remembered figures, imagined a phallic space and psychic structure for women, and held models of female development in which activity was as prominent and mutative as identifications around passivity and absence. The turn in psychoanalytic thinking after the 1970s was often to imagine the meaning of the woman’s particular body in relation to desire. Receptivity became an interesting trope in which to think about female sexuality (Mayer 1985), and not too much later the possibility of receptivity in men could be imagined (Fogel 1998). Psychoanalytic tools can be put to work to tell many unique and protean developmental stories. Rigid and frozen boundaries, like our own American borders, are political creations, undermined by many theoretical forces, inside psychoanalysis and outside (queer theory, chaos theory, fractals, anthropology).

Translation And Transcription

González makes an interesting decision in his presentation of the complex and deeply moving details of Sullivan’s diaries and diaried account of her/his life trajectory, the journey from she to he, and his particular investment/immersion in male homosexuality. For one thing, González decides quite explicitly not to embed this story in the standard developmental narrative of psychoanalysis: early attachment, object relations, oedipal links and inhibition, etc. If we think in Laplanchean terms, we might see this as a decision to inaugurate the story of Sheila with her diary writing, as Sheila, entering puberty, begins to undertake the complex, always incomplete work of translation. Whatever the messages through which gender and sexuality were conveyed/misconveyed to the child, however they were encoded, González starts the story as the individual is taking her experience through the process of translation and après-coup—the gradual narrativizing of preconscious and unconscious experience and the often radical rewriting of history that such a process can yield.

As González tells us, a crucial aspect of Sullivan’s life was her long and passionate commitment to writing. Writing is a mechanism for separation from a brutalizing culture, conventional or anarchic, each binding in its own way. Writing is a powerful trope or metaphor for González in tracking the changes and evolution of Sheila/Lou, and here he is following on ideas about the transformations of trans persons (Prosser 1998; Gherovici 2010) as inevitably a process of inscription.

“In Prosser’s use of the term,” writes González, “the transsexual is an ‘authorial’ or ‘constructing’ subject, who literally becomes through narration, in a complex dialogue with medico-legal establishments and the social. This is similar to the Lacanian analyst Patricia Gherovici’s conception of the transsexual body as a written body (2010)” (p. 66). González is inviting us to see that the very project of the diary is part of the inscription of gender and sexuality into a body. In imaginatively claiming that Lou is writing/righting or even riting (as in ritualizing) a trans body/mind, González gives a thick description (Geertz 1973) of how this young person transforms first psyche and then, inevitably and slowly, body into an identity as male and homosexual.

It is not that Laplanchean translation starts in adolescence, but that González begins where we/he can enter Sullivan’s process of translation, undertaken through the diary. This writing, and what I am calling translation, is both conventional and unconventional, an outlaw story and a struggle for coherence and meaning. This is the standard fare of many diaries and memoirs, and of many analytic narratives.

I am suggesting that González’s decision to focus on archival material, the diaries over decades of development starting in early adolescence, is both political and theoretical. He privileges the subject’s (diarist’s or patient’s) account and representation of what has happened and what it means. We see the outcome of translation, not a genetic or developmental template with milestones met or unmet. I feel great attachment and commitment to developmental theory and observation, but in this project González asks us to be attentive to the story as crafted or, as Laplanche would say, translated.

I want to consider briefly this question of writing and its role in authorizing identity that is intertwined with sexuality and other forms of subjectivity (intersectionality; Crenshaw 1989). There is without question a liberatory and revolutionary role that speech and language can play within cultures and within psychic life. There is freedom in claiming otherness. But this liberatory role also has limits. Language is a product of culture. It is a powerful tool, but it comes with some already inscribed crafting. If we think of language as structure and meaning, syntax and semantics, we need to recognize its limits as a fully revolutionary device. Fausto-Sterling had a transgressive thought to insist on a five-gender/sex system. But she did not persist in this project. As Audre Lorde writes, “We cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools” (1984, p. 110). I draw on her ideas to suggest that we be mindful that we cannot escape fully from history or the prison house of language. We will be both constrained and freed by language, as Lou Sullivan surely was. I think in this regard of a wry comment by Erving Goffman: “In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant, a father, college educated, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports” (1963, p. 128).

He writes this in Stigma: The Management of Spoiled Identity, and I find it a useful caution in the discussion and imagination of paths to gender and sexual freedom. Fluidity and fixed social demands inevitably coexist and evolve in conflict and in synchrony. Shame is no stranger to gender arrangements, or to sexuality, as Stein and others have usefully insisted. We must live and think and practice within these contradictions.

In his conclusion, González turns (or turns back) to psychoanalysis in thinking about Sullivan’s capacity to recover from breakdown and a despairing point in his history. His development has included transitioning surgeries, a complex love affair of long duration and sad denouement, and a period of despair/breakdown. González, who has freed himself and us from the constraints of genetic interpretation, wonders about Lou’s ability to mourn the loss of a sibling as a mutative element in his recovery from depression. I think this rare lapse in González’ focus on Sullivan’s work of inscription, translation, and self-narration is actually useful. Development and individual history matter, even as we need to loosen the iron grip of analytic theory, as well as the pressures exerted by culture.

Perhaps luckily, we cannot escape from psychoanalysis. Nor should we try. I thank Francisco González for this beautiful walk through a brave and determined life (and its recounting), and through the kinds of integrated theories we will need going forward. I hope to have added to this discussion.