Gender as Lint Collector

Abstract

ABSTRACT The conceptualization of femininity and masculinity beyond normative viewpoints is one of the most difficult challenges to the psychoanalytic field. It is challenging to think of gender beyond the binary phantasies of a stabilized body – male/female. And yet, binaries are unstable. While new subjectivities such as transgender and non-binary challenge our conception of gender, increased debates in the field regarding demands for gender transitioning, particularly among children and adolescence, reveal an implicit investment and limiting heteronormative ideology that is animated in the tacit alignment of gender with biology. In this brief paper I conceptualize gender in a way that is consistent with a psychoanalytic view of the body and psyche as being out of joint. The psychoanalytic conceptualization of the relationship between the body and its ever-flourishing meanings, as uneven, positions gender as closely linked with sexuality. Conceptualizing gender as a libidinal experience, not easily separated from the unruliness of sexuality, allows us to encounter new and creative formations that exceed our limited conception of human nature.