Undoing Gender (22 page)

Franklin and McKinnon write that kinship is “no longer conceptualized as grounded in a singular and fixed idea of ‘natural’ relation, but is seen to be self-consciously assembled from a multiplicity of possible bits and pieces.”
³¹
It would seem crucial, then, to understand the assembling operation they describe in light of the thesis that kinship is itself a kind of doing, a practice that enacts that assemblage of significations as it takes place. But with such a definition in place, can kinship be definitively separated from other communal and affiliative practices? Kinship loses its specificity as an object once it becomes characterized loosely as modes of enduring relationship. Obviously, not all kinship relations last, but whatever relations qualify for kinship enter into a norm or a convention that has some durability, and that norm acquires its durability through being reinstated time and again.

Thus, a norm does not have to be static in order to last; in fact, it
cannot
be static if it is to last. These are relations that are prone to naturalization and disrupted repeatedly by the impossibility of settling the relation between nature and culture; moreover, in Franklin and McKinnon’s terms, kinship is one way for signifying the origin of culture. I would put it this way: the story of kinship, as we have it from Lévi-Strauss, is an allegory for the origin of culture and a symptom of the process of naturalization itself, one that takes place, brilliantly, insidiously, in the name of culture itself. Thus, one might add that debates about the distinction between nature and culture, which are clearly heightened when the distinctions among animal, human, machine, hybrid, and cyborg are no longer settled, become figured at the site of kinship, for even a theory of kinship that is radically culturalist frames itself against a discredited “nature” and so remains in a constitutive and definitional relation to that which it claims to transcend.

One can see how quickly kinship loses its specificity in terms of the global economy, for instance, when one considers the politics of international adoption and donor insemination. For new “families” where relations of filiation are not based on biology are sometimes conditioned by innovations in biotechnology or international commodity relations and the trade in children. And now there is the question of control over genetic resources, conceived of as a new set of property relations to be negotiated by legislation and court decisions. But there are also clearly salutary consequences of the breakdown of the symbolic order, since kinship ties that bind persons to one another may well be no more or less than the intensification of community ties, may or may not be based on enduring or exclusive sexual relations, and may well consist of ex-lovers, nonlovers, friends, and community members. In this sense, then, the relations of kinship arrive at boundaries that call into question the distinguishability of kinship from community, or that call for a different conception of friendship. These constitute a “breakdown” of traditional kinship that not only displaces the central place of biological and sexual relations from its definition but gives sexuality a domain separate from that of kinship, which allows for the durable tie to be thought outside of the conjugal frame and thus opens kinship to a set of community ties that are irreducible to family.

Psychoanalytic Narrative, Normative Discourse, and Critique Unfortunately, the important work in what might be called postkinship studies in anthropology has not been matched by similarly innovative work in psychoanalysis, and the latter sometimes still relies on presumptive heterosexual kinship to theorize the sexual formation of the subject although there is some important work there, for instance, that of Ken Corbett.
³²
Whereas several scholars in anthropology have not only opened up the meaning and possible forms of kinship but have called into question whether kinship is always the defining moment of culture. Indeed, if we call into question the postulate by which Oedipalization, conceived in rigid terms, becomes the condition for culture itself, how do we then return to psychoanalysis once this delinkage has taken place? If Oedipus is not the sine qua non of culture, that does not mean there is no place for Oedipus. It simply means that the complex that goes by that name may take a variety of cultural forms, and that it will no longer be able to function as a normative condition of culture itself. Oedipus may or may not function universally, but even those who claim that it does would have to find out in what ways it figures and would not be able to maintain that it always figures in the same way. For it to be a universal—and I confess to being an agnostic on this point—in no way confirms the thesis that it is the condition of culture. Such a thesis purports to know that Oedipus always functions in the same way, namely, as a condition of culture itself. But if Oedipus is interpreted broadly, as a name for the triangularity of desire, then the salient questions become: What forms does that triangularity take? Must it presume heterosexuality?

And what happens when we begin to understand Oedipus outside of the exchange of women and the presumption of heterosexual exchange?

Psychoanalysis does not need to be associated exclusively with the reactionary moment in which culture is understood to be based on an irrefutable heterosexuality. Indeed, there are so many questions that psychoanalysis might pursue in order to help understand the psychic life of those who live outside of normative kinship or in some mix of normative and “non-”: What is the fantasy of homosexual love that the child unconsciously adopts in gay families? How do children who are displaced from original families or born through implantation or donor insemination understand their origins? What cultural narratives are at their disposal, and what particular interpretations do they give to these conditions? Must the story that the child tells about his or her origin, a story that will no doubt be subject to many retellings, conform to a single story about how the human comes into being? Or will we find the human emerging through narrative structures that are not reducible to one story, the story of a capitalized Culture itself? How must we revise our understanding of the need for a narrative understanding of self that a child may have that includes a consideration of how those narratives are revised and interrupted in time? And how do we begin to understand what forms of gender differentiation take place for the child when heterosexuality is not the presumption of Oedipalization?

Indeed, this is the occasion not only for psychoanalysis to rethink its own uncritically accepted notions of culture but for new kinship and sexual arrangements to compel a rethinking of culture itself. When the relations that bind are no longer traced to heterosexual procreation, the very homology between nature and culture that philosophers such as Agacinski support tends to become undermined. Indeed, they do not stay static in her own work, for if it is the symbolic order that mandates heterosexual origins, and the symbolic is understood to legitimate social relations, why would she worry about putatively illegitimate social relations? She assumes that the latter have the power to undermine the symbolic, suggesting that the symbolic does not precede the social and, finally, has no independence from it.

It seems clear that when psychoanalytic practitioners make public claims about the psychotic or dangerous status of gay families, they are wielding public discourse in ways that need to be strongly countered. The Lacanians do not have a monopoly on such claims. In an interview with Jacqueline Rose, the well-known Kleinian practitioner Hanna Segal reiterates her view that “homosexuality is an attack on the parental couple,” and “a developmental arrest.” She expresses outrage over a situation in which two lesbians raise a boy. She adds that she considers “the adult homosexual structure to be pathological.”
³³
When asked at a public presentation in October of 1998 whether she approved of two lesbians raising a boy, she answered flatly “No.” To respond directly to Segal, as many people have, with an insistence on the normalcy of lesbian and gay families is to accept that the debate should center on the distinction between normal and pathological.

But if we seek entrance to the halls of normalcy or, indeed, reverse the discourse, to applaud our “pathology” (i.e., as the only “sane” position within homophobic culture), we have not called the defining framework into question. And once we enter that framework, we are to some degree defined by its terms, which means that we are
as
defined by those terms when we seek to establish ourselves within the boundaries of normality as we are when we assume the impermeability of those boundaries and position ourselves as its permanent outside. After all, even Agacinski knows how to make use of the claim that lesbians and gays are “inherently” subversive when she claims that they should
not
be given the right to marry because homosexuality is, by definition, “outside institutions and fixed models.”
³⁴

We may think that double-edged thinking will lead us only to political paralysis but consider the more serious consequences that follow from taking a single stand in such debates. If we engage the terms that these debates supply, then we ratify the frame at the moment in which we take our stand. This signals a certain paralysis in the face of exercising power to change the terms by which such topics are rendered thinkable. Indeed, a more radical social transformation is precisely at stake when we refuse, for instance, to allow kinship to become reducible to “family,” or when we refuse to allow the field of sexuality to become gauged against the marriage form. For as surely as rights to adoption and, indeed, to reproductive technology ought to be secured for individuals and alliances outside the marriage frame, it would constitute a drastic curtailment of progressive sexual politics to allow marriage and family, or even kinship, to mark the exclusive parameters within which sexual life is thought. That the sexual field has become foreclosed through such debates about whether we might marry or conceive or raise children makes clear that any answer, that is, both the “yes” and the “no,” works in the service of circumscribing reality in precipitous ways. If we decide that these are the decisive issues, and know which side we are on, then we have accepted an epistemological field structured by a fundamental loss, one that we can no longer name enough even to grieve. The life of sexuality, kinship, and community that becomes unthinkable within the terms of these norms constitutes the lost horizon of radical sexual politics, and we find our way “politically” in the wake of the ungrievable.

6. Longing for Recognition

Jessica Benjamin’s recent work seeks to establish the possibility for intersubjective recognition, thereby setting a philosophical norm for a therapeutic discourse. Her work has always been distinctively defined by its groundedness in critical social theory and clinical practice. Whereas the Frankfurt School maintained a strong theoretical interest in psychoanalysis and spawned the important work of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich,
The Inability to Mourn,
among other texts, it has been rare since that time to find a critical theorist trained in that venue who actively practices psychoanalysis, and whose theoretical contributions combine critical reflection and clinical insight in the way that Benjamin’s does. Central to her philosophical inheritance is the notion of recognition itself, a key concept that was developed in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
(111–19) and which has assumed new meanings in the work of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth.
¹

In some ways, Benjamin’s work relies on the presumption that recognition is possible, and that it is the condition under which the human subject achieves psychic self-understanding and acceptance.

There are several passages in almost any text of hers that give a sense of what recognition is. It is not the simple presentation of a subject for another that facilitates the recognition of that self-presenting subject by the Other. It is, rather, a process that is engaged when subject and Other understand themselves to be reflected in one another, but where this reflection does not result in a collapse of the one into the Other (through an incorporative identification, for instance) or a projection that annihilates the alterity of the Other. In Benjamin’s appropriation of the Hegelian notion of recognition, recognition is a normative ideal, an aspiration that guides clinical practice. Recognition implies that we see the Other as separate, but as structured psychically in ways that are shared. Of utmost importance for Benjamin, following Habermas in some ways, is the notion that communication itself becomes both the vehicle and example of recognition. Recognition is neither an act that one performs nor is it literalized as the event in which we each “see” one another and are “seen.” It takes place through communication, primarily but not exclusively verbal, in which subjects are transformed by virtue of the communicative practice in which they are engaged.

One can see how this model supplies a norm for both social theory and therapeutic practice. It is to Benjamin’s credit that she has elaborated a theory that spans both domains as productively as it does.

One of the distinctive contributions of her theory is to insist that intersubjectivity is not the same as object relations, and that “intersubjectivity” adds to object relations the notion of an external Other, one who exceeds the psychic construction of the object in complementary terms. What this means is that whatever the psychic and fantasmatic relation to the object may be, it ought to be understood in terms of the larger dynamic of recognition. The relation to the object is not the same as the relation to the Other, but the relation to the Other provides a framework for understanding the relation to the object. The subject not only forms certain psychic relations to objects, but the subject is formed by and through those psychic relations.