{"id":4984,"date":"2010-02-20T16:16:17","date_gmt":"2010-02-20T20:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=4984"},"modified":"2010-03-17T15:37:58","modified_gmt":"2010-03-17T19:37:58","slug":"4984","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/02\/20\/4984\/","title":{"rendered":"what psychic price normative gender?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender<\/em>. New York: Routledge, 2004.\u00a0 Print.<\/p>\n

the triadic structure for thinking about desire has implications for thinking gender beyond complementarity and reducing the risk of heterosexist bias implied by the doctrine of complementarity.<\/p>\n

I’m no great fan of the phallus … I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire.\u00a0 Nor do I accept the view that would posit the phallus as the primary or originary moment of desire, such that all desire either extends through identification or mimetic reflection of the paternal signifier.\u00a0 I understand that progressive Lacanians are quick to distinguish between the phallus and the penis and claim that the “paternal” is a metaphor only.<\/p>\n

What they do not explain is the way the very distinction that is said to make “phallus” and “paternal” safe for use continues to rely upon and reinstitute the correspondences, penis\/phallus and paternal\/maternal that the distinctions are said to overcome. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I believe in the power of subversive resignification to an extent and applaud efforts to disseminate the phallus and to cultivate, for instance, dyke dads and the like.\u00a0 But it would be a mistake, I believe, to privilege either the penis or paternity as the terms to be most widely and radically resignified.\u00a0 Why those terms rather than some others?\u00a0 The “other” to these terms is, of course, the question interrogated here, and Benjamin has helped us to imagine, theoretically, a psychic landscape in which the phallus does not control the circuit of psychic effects. But are we equipped to rethink the problem of triangulation now that we understand the risks to phallic reduction (136).<\/p>\n

The turn to the preoedipal has been, of course, to rethink desire in relation to the maternal, but such a turn engages us, unwittingly, in the resurrection of the dyad: not the phallus, but the maternal, for the two options available are “dad” and “mom.”\u00a0 But are there other kinds of descriptions that might complicate what happens at the level of desire and, indeed, at the level of gender and kinship? 136<\/p>\n

[…] I do think however, that (a) triangulation might be profitably rethought beyond oedipalization<\/strong> or, indeed, as part of the very postoedipal displacement of the oedipal<\/strong>; (b) certain assumptions about the primacy of gender dimorphism limit the radicalism of Benjamin’s critique; and (c) that the model of overinclusiveness cannot quite become the condition for recognizing difference that Benjamin maintains because it resists the notion of a self that is ek-statically<\/strong> [standing outside of oneself] involved in the Other, decentered, through its identifications which neither exludes nor includes the Other in question.<\/p>\n

Postoedipal Triangulation<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Were we right to presume the binary of man and woman when so many gendered lives cannot assume that binary?\u00a0 Were we right to see the relation as a binary when the reference to the tertiary is what permitted us to see the homosexual aims that run through heterosexual relationality. … At what psychic price does normative gender become established? 144<\/p>\n

How is it that presuming complementarity presumes a self-referential heterosexual that is not definitionally crossed by homosexual aims?\u00a0 If we could not ask these questions in the past, do they not now form part of the theoretical challenge for a psychoanalysis concerned with the politics of gender and sexuality, at once feminist and queer?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.\u00a0 Print. the triadic structure for thinking about desire has implications for thinking gender beyond complementarity and reducing the risk of heterosexist bias implied by the doctrine of complementarity. I’m no great fan of the phallus … I do not propose a return to a notion of the … Continue reading “what psychic price normative gender?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,111,24,15],"tags":[133],"class_list":["post-4984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-desire","category-lacan","category-subjectivity","tag-undoinggender"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4984"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4986,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4984\/revisions\/4986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}