Undoing Gender (24 page)

Lacan’s way of formulating this position is, of course, derived in part from Lévi-Strauss’s theory of the exchange of women. Male clan members exchange women in order to establish a symbolic relation with other male clan members. The women are “wanted” precisely because they are wanted by the Other. Their value is thus constituted as an exchange value, though one that is not reducible to Marx’s understanding of that term. Queer theorist Eve Sedgwick came along in
Between Men
and asked who was, in fact, desiring whom in such a scene. Her point was to show that what first appears to be a relation of a man who desires a woman turns out to be implicitly a homosocial bond between two men. Her argument was not to claim, in line with the “phallus” affiliates, that the homosocial bond comes at the expense of the heterosexual, but that the homosocial (distinct from the homosexual) is articulated precisely through the heterosexual. This argument has had far-reaching consequences for the thinking of both heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as for thinking the symbolic nature of the homosocial bond (and, hence, by implication, all of the Lacanian symbolic). The point is not that the phallus is had by one and not by another, but that it is circulated along a heterosexual and homosexual circuit at once, thus confounding the identificatory positions for every “actor” in the scene. The man who seeks to send the woman to another man sends some aspect of himself, and the man who receives her, receives him as well. She circuits, but is she finally wanted, or does she merely exemplify a value by becoming the representative of both men’s desire, the place where those desires meet, and where they fail to meet, a place where that potentially homosexual encounter is relayed, suspended, and contained?

I raise this issue because it seems to me that it is not possible to read the profound and perhaps inescapable ways that heterosexuality and homosexuality are defined through one another. For instance, to what extent is heterosexual jealousy often compounded by an inability to avow same-sex desire?
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A man’s woman lover wants another man, and even “has” him, which is experienced by the first man at his own expense. What is the price that the first man has to pay? When, in this scene, he desires the desire of the Other, is it his lover’s desire (let us imagine that it is)? Or is it also the prerogative that his lover has to take another
man
as her lover (let us imagine that it also is)? When he rages against her for her infidelity, does he rage because she refuses to make the sacrifice that he has already made? And even though such a reading might suggest that he identifies with her in the scene, it is unclear how he identifies, or whether it is, finally, a “feminine” identification. He may want her imagined position in the scene, but what does he imagine her position to be?

It cannot be presumed that he takes her position to be feminine, even if he imagines her in a receptive response to the other man. If that is his receptivity that he finds relocated there at the heart of his own jealous fantasy, then perhaps it is more appropriate to claim that he imagines her in a position of passive male homosexuality. Is it, finally, really possible to distinguish in such a case between a heterosexual and a homosexual passion? After all, he has lost her, and that enrages him, and she has acted the aim he cannot or will not act, and that enrages him.

Benjamin’s insistence that we do not have to understand desire and identification in a relation of mutual exclusion clearly makes room for such simultaneous passions. But does she give us a way to describe how heterosexuality becomes a venue for homosexual passion or how homosexuality becomes the conduit for heterosexual passion? It seems that the dyadic structure, when it is imposed upon gender, comes to assume a gender complementarity that fails to see the rigors at work to keep the “dyadic” relation reassuringly just between those two. To claim, as Benjamin does, that the third comes in as the intersubjective process itself, as the “surviving” of destruction as a more livable and creative “negation,” is already to make the scene definitionally happier than it can be. Of course, she lets us know that incorporation and destruction are risks that every relation runs, but these are to be worked through in order to reach the possibility of a recognition in which the “two” selves in relation are transformed by virtue of their dynamic relation with one another.

But what are they to do with the other third? Note here that the queer theoretical redescription of the “exchange of women” does not return to the Lacanian feminist insistence on the primacy of the phallus. It is not that one wants the desire of the Other, because that desire will mimetically reflect one’s own position as having the phallus. Nor does one want what other men want in order more fully to identify as a man. Indeed, as the triangulation begins in which heterosexuality is transmuted into homosociality, the identifications proliferate with precisely the complexity that the usual Lacanian positions either rule out or describe as pathology. Where desire and identification are played out as mutually exclusive possibilities against the inescapable background of a (presumptively heterosexual) sexual difference, the actors in the scene I describe can be understood only as trying to occupy positions in vain, warring with a symbolic that has already arranged in advance for their defeat. Thus, the man is trying to “refuse” sexual difference in imagining himself in his lover’s position with another man, and so the moralizing relegation of desire to pathology takes place once again within the preorchestrated drama of sexual difference.

I believe that both Benjamin and I agree on the untenability of such an approach.

But where precisely do we differ? In the first place, as I’ve suggested above, the relationship cannot be understood apart from its reference to the third, and the third cannot be easily described as the “process” of the relationship itself. I do not mean to suggest either that the third is “excluded” from the dyad or that the dyad must exclude the third for the dyad to take place. No the third is both inside the relationship, as a constituting passion, and “outside” as the partially unrealized and prohibited object of desire.

So let’s complicate the scene again by rethinking it from the woman’s point of view. Let’s imagine that she is bisexual and has sought to have a relationship with “man number 1,” putting off for a while her desires for women, which tend to be desires to be a bottom. But instead of finding a woman as the “third,” she finds a man (man number 2), and “tops” him. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that man number 1 would rather die than be “topped” by his girlfriend, since that would be too “queer” for him. So he knows that she is topping another man, possibly penetrating him anally, and he is furious for several reasons. But what is she after? If she is bisexual, she is a bisexual who happens to be “doing” a few men right now. But perhaps she is also staging a scene in which the outbreak of jealousy puts the relation at risk. Perhaps she does this in order to break from the relationship in order to be free to pursue “none of the above.”

Would it be possible to see her intensification of heterosexual activity at this moment as a way of (a) seeing her first lover’s jealousy and goading him toward greater possessiveness; (b) topping her second lover and gratifying the desire that is off limits to her with the first; and (c) setting the two men against one another in order to make room for the possibility of a lesbian relationship in which she is not a top at all; and (d) intensifying her heterosexuality in order to ward off the psychic dangers she associates with being a lesbian bottom? Note that it may be that the one desire is not in the service of another, such that we might be able to say which one is the real and authentic one, and which is simply a camouflage or deflection. Indeed, it may be that this particular character can’t find a “real” desire that supersedes the sequence that she undergoes, and that what is real is the sequence itself. But it may be that the affair with man number 2 becomes, indirectly, the venue for the convergence of these passions, their momentary constellation, and that to understand her one must accept something of their simultaneous and dissonant claims on truth. Surely, the pattern in which a man and woman heterosexually involved both amicably break their relationship in order to pursue homosexual desires is not uncommon in urban centers. I don’t claim to know what happens here, or what happens when a gay male and a lesbian who are friends start to sleep with one another. But it seems fair to assume that a certain crossing of homosexual and heterosexual passions takes place such that these are not two distinct strands of a braid, but simultaneous vehicles for one another.

I think that this comes out most distinctly in discussions of transgender. It becomes difficult to say whether the sexuality of the transgendered person is homosexual or heterosexual. The term “queer” gained currency precisely to address such moments of productive undecidability, but we have not yet seen a psychoanalytic attempt to take account of these cultural formations in which certain vacillating notions of sexual orientation are constitutive. This becomes most clear when we think about transsexuals who are in transition, where identity is in the process of being achieved, but is not yet there. Or, most emphatically, for those transsexuals who understand transition to be a permanent process. If we cannot refer unambiguously to gender in such cases, do we have the point of reference for making claims about sexuality? In the case of transgender, where transsexualism does not come into play, there are various ways of crossing that cannot be understood as stable achievements, where the gender crossing constitutes, in part, the condition of eroticization itself. In the film
Boys Don’t Cry
,
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it seems that transgender is both about identifying as a boy and wanting a girl, so it is a crossing over from being a girl to being a heterosexual boy. Brandon Teena identifies as a heterosexual boy, but we see several moments of disidentification as well, where the fantasy breaks down and a tampon has to be located, used, and then discarded with no trace. His identification thus recommences, has to be reorchestrated in a daily way as a credible fantasy, one that compels belief. The girl lover seems not to know, but this is the not-knowing of fetishism, an uncertain ground of eroticization. It remains unclear whether the girlfriend does not know, even when she claims that she does not, and it is unclear whether she knows even when she claims to know. Indeed, one of the most thrilling moments of the film is when the girlfriend, knowing, fully reengages the fantasy. And one of the most brittle moments takes place when the girlfriend, knowing, seems no longer to be able to enter the fantasy fully. The disavowal not only makes the fantasy possible, but strengthens it, and on occasion strengthens it to the point of being able to survive avowal.

Similarly, it would not be possible to say that Brandon’s body stays out of the picture, and that this occlusion makes the fantasy possible, since it does enter the picture but only through the terms that the fantasy instates. This is not a simple “denial” of anatomy, but the erotic deployment of the body, its covering, its prosthetic extension for the purposes of a reciprocal erotic fantasy. There are lips and hands and eyes, the strength of Brandon’s body on and in Lana, his/her girlfriend, arms, weight, and thrust. So it is hardly a simple picture of “disembodiment,” and hardly “sad.” When s/he desires his/her girlfriend’s desire, what is it that s/he wants? Brandon occupies the place of the subject of desire, but s/he does not roll on his/her back in the light and ask his/her girl to suck off his/her dildo. Perhaps that would be too “queer,” but perhaps as well it would kill the very conditions that make the fantasy possible for both of them. S/he works the dildo in the dark so that the fantasy can emerge in full force, so that its condition of disavowal is fulfilled. S/he occupies that place, to be sure, and suffers the persecution and the rape from the boys in the film precisely because s/he has occupied it too well. Is Brandon a lesbian or a boy? Surely, the question itself defines Brandon’s predicament in some way, even as Brandon consistently answers the predicament by doing himself as a boy. It will not work to say that because Brandon must do himself as a boy that this is a sign that Brandon is lesbian. For boys surely do themselves as boys, and no anatomy enters gender without being “done” in some way.

Would it be any easier for us if we were to ask whether the lesbian who only makes love using her dildo to penetrate her girlfriend, whose sexuality is so fully scripted by apparent heterosexuality that no other relation is possible, is a boy or a “boy”? If she says that she can only make love as a “boy,” she is, we might say, transgendered in bed, if not in the street. Brandon’s crossing involves a constant dare posed to the public norms of the culture, and so occupies a more public site on the continuum of transgender. It is not simply about being able to have sex a certain way, but also about appearing as a masculine gender. So, in this sense, Brandon is no lesbian, despite the fact that the film, caving in, wants to return him to that status after the rape, implying that the return to (achievement of?) lesbianism is somehow facilitated by that rape, returning Brandon, as the rapists sought to do, to a “true” feminine identity that “comes to terms” with anatomy. This “coming to terms” means only that anatomy is instrumentalized according to acceptable cultural norms, producing a “woman” as the effect of that instrumentalization and normalizing gender even as it allows for desire to be queer. One could conjecture that Brandon only wants to be a public boy in order to gain the legitimate right to have sexual relations as he does, but such an explanation assumes that gender is merely instrumental to sexuality. But gender has its own pleasures for Brandon, and serves its own purposes. These pleasures of identification exceed those of desire, and, in that sense, Brandon is not only or easily a lesbian.

Recognition and the Limits of Complementarity Can gender complementarity help us here? Benjamin writes, “the critique of gender complementarity results in a necessary paradox: It at once upsets the oppositional categories of femininity and masculinity while recognizing that these positions inescapably organize experience.”
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And right before this statement, she asks, “if we do not begin with the opposition between woman and man, with woman’s negative position in that binary, we seem to dissolve the very basis for our having questioned gender categories in the first place.” But what were those questions, and were they really posed in the right way? Were we right to presume the binary of man and woman when so many gendered lives cannot assume that binary? 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? Should we have asked these questions of gender instead? At what psychic price does normative gender become established? How is it that presuming complementarity presumes a self-referential heterosexual that is not definitionally crossed by homosexual aims? 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?