Dyess, Cynthia and Tim Dean, “Gender: The Impossibility of Meaning.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 10:5 (2000): 735 – 56. Web. Oct 5, 2009.
For Lacan, as for Freud, the unconscious has no understanding of sexual difference. This is still a radical notion; it must count among the central insights of psychoanalysis most frequently in danger of disappearing when psychoanalytic theory discards Freud’s earliest discoveries. It is also a tremendously difficult idea, and there are different ways of grasping it. One way would be to hypothesize that the first sight of anatomical, genital difference is traumatic for a child in that this difference cannot be fully assimilated by the ego — assimilated, that is, to one’s sense of his or her own bodily self. Although we would not want to suggest that this moment is an empirically verifiable event in every subject’s history, nevertheless each person’s first encounter with the morphological difference of the other sex presents him or her with a failure of recognition. It is this inaugural collapse of sense with respect to sexual difference that makes gender traumatic and justifies aligning it with the Lacanian real (752).
This point raises an issue on which we part company with Copjec’s account. Attempting to specify the distinctness of sexual difference vis-à-vis other categories of difference, Copjec (1994) argued that “sexual difference is unlike racial, class, or ethnic differences. Whereas these differences are inscribed in the symbolic, sexual difference is not: only the failure of its inscription is marked in the symbolic. Sexual difference, in other words, is a real and not a symbolic difference” (p. 207). Yet once sexual difference is understood as real in the sense that it is experienced originally as traumatic, then we can start to appreciate how racial difference also operates as a real, not merely a symbolic, difference. One’s first encounter with another human whose skin is colored very differently than his or her own also prompts a failure of recognition; to the extent that one cannot make sense of this difference, racial difference too remains in the real. The distinction between sexual difference and racial difference lies in the fact that every human encounters the trauma of sexual difference very early in life, whereas an encounter with racial difference may be deferred far longer, especially in racially homogeneous cultures. (note 4: 752)
There is a certain driven quality to these projects—to Freud’s essentialist stories as well as to the current dogma of gender’s plasticity. This may reflect the inevitable downfall of narrative, its failure to let itself fail in making sense. Perhaps the most obvious way in which Butler’s theory of gender attempts to make too much sense is in its concept of gender identification as loss resolved by melancholic identification (Butler, 1995a). Butler and Copjec agree that the symbolic order is founded on what exceeds its grasp. But Butler takes the additional step of theorizing this absence of meaning as a set of culturally foreclosed identifications. By presuming she knows what is already missing, Butler follows in Freud’s footsteps when he set about providing us with his infamous developmental narratives of gender. In this respect, the resolutely abstract quality of Copjec’s argument is particularly refreshing. She offers no account of why sexual difference should be traumatic for the individual, but only attempts to show us in logical terms how this is necessarily so. Culturally contingent explanations of gender will inevitably vary, but, as she puts it, “sex does not budge” (Copjec, 1994, p. 211) (753).
Gender is the prime example not only of the impossibility of meaning, but also of the structural impossibility of full relationality. This implies that our theory of gender must describe not only the limit conditions of signification, but also those of relationality. The essentialist, heterosexist alternative refuses to admit any such limitations. In this view, gender is something substantial that one acquires and that lends meaning to one’s relations. Men and women find their counterpart in each other. The social constructivist alternative also eschews limits; as discourse determines subjectivity, subjectivity can be manipulated via the rhetorical device of deconstruction. In other words, it’s all in our hands, and a potentially endless number of possibilities for full relationship may prevail. Yet no analysis of external limits, be they biological or social, ultimately accounts for the impossibility of completely knowing ourselves or one another. Psychoanalysis, when it attempts to theorize this internally imposed impossibility, positions itself to address how the connection between the individual subject and the social is continually mediated by factors outside our awareness. In so doing, it can help us fail better.