Genre, from the Latin genus is a very polysemous word in the French language. It means, among other things, way of being, look, type or fashion. There exists a right and a wrong genre: when Swann spoke of Odette, saying that “she was not at all his type” Proust did not imagine the ambiguity which we could attribute to his famous little sentence. Genre, in the way we use it here, is the translation of the English word gender which is a much more precise grammatical and sexual term of classification. Therefore, it is French grammar which, by separating nouns into masculine or feminine groups, either according to sex or, more often, completely arbitrarily, allows us to metonymically arrive at the meaning we are interested in. The French language only has two genders: masculine and feminine.
What is gender or/and how can it boast of being an identity distinct from that of sexual identity?
GENDER AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Freud wrote that “anatomy is destiny.” The problem of masculine versus feminine is as old as mankind. The notion of gender, because it allows for the confusion of the sexes, could only come about because of the visible difference between them. Every society, when confronted with secondary sexual characteristics and genital complementarity, defined different norms and gender roles depending on the time period and where they were located in the world, with the individual having to identify with the sex assigned to them. In most traditional societies, the correspondence between sex and gender goes without saying.
Sex is a genetic characteristic while gender is an acquired characteristic. Anatomical sex is a fact or a perception, while gender is a representation.
GENDER AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
The concept of gender is not present in Freud’s works, which are based on psychic bisexuality.
In North America, psychoanalysis was influenced by more pragmatic and experimental disciplines, such as anthropology and neurophysiology. It evolved differently, focusing more on a clinical approach rather than an epistemological one.
Since 1989, Robert Stoller has underlined the importance of the role of gender identity:
It is important to make a distinction between gender identity and gender roles or manifest behaviour within a society as was studied by Money in the 1950s, with the latter only showing a much delayed environmental influence. We will return to this point later because recent theories have given much more importance to the role of socio-cultural conditioning.
In the field of sexology, Robert Stoller’s hypotheses have been taken up by Claude Crépault, who went on to develop and systematize them in a new discipline named Sexoanalysis.
GENDER AND SEXOANALYSIS
Claude Crépault, who is a professor emeritus of sexology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), developed the concept of sexoanalysis in the 1980s from several different hypotheses, with the main ones being borrowed from Stoller.
The first hypothesis put forth by Stoller was that of proto-femininity. Found in both sexes, this proto-femininity or primary femininity is in opposition to the Freudian concept of psychic bisexuality. According to Crépault, there is a primacy of the feminine in sexual ontogenesis. He places the feminine gender first and argues that it acts as the strongest marker of identity, with masculine identity being the acquired one. As a consequence, as far as gender is concerned, a girl’s evolution occurs along an identity continuum, while a break is necessary for a boy to detach himself from maternal femininity and to affirm his masculine gender as long as he can lean on a sufficiently present paternal figure.
The extremely close relationship with the mother following a child’s birth is a paradise which must be abandoned in order for the child to affirm itself in a spontaneous act of individuation. This paradise is felt to be lost too soon and nostalgia for this closeness is never completely erased from the unconscious. It is the child’s first separation and their first experience with mourning which has as a consequence the development of anxiety: fear of abandonment, fear of, in separating from the mother, losing her love, fear of being nothing. Children can try to reduce their anxiety via an unconscious fusional regression, with the possible risk of going too far and generating a new anxiety – that of the negation of their being or of being re-swallowed up by the mother. The acquisition of a personal identity is weakened during this conflict. However, a male child’s need to affirm himself within a gender other than his mother’s creates new tensions: regressing to a fusional state also means returning to a state of femininity, leading to a fear of emasculation which, when faced with the natural drive towards masculinization triggers another fear, that of not being virile enough and what Crépault (1997) calls “fear of masculinitude” (p. 45). In a male subject, in the resolution of the core gender complex, the impulse towards masculinization therefore favors the acquisition of personal identity. But the construction of gender identity is easily compromised as in the case of a fusional relationship with an overly protective mother or emotional frustration due to a distant, phallic, and castrative mother. On the contrary, for a female child, gender identification is easier in theory, with direct assimilation of the mother’s gender. However, her personal identity can be threatened by the very same anomalies in the mother-daughter relationship. For children of both sexes, the father also plays an extremely important role for individual and gender identity acquisition as long as he is sufficiently present and not denied in the mother’s discourse.
Another of sexoanalysis’ hypotheses is that of a specific sexual unconscious where the sexual is explained by the sexual, which may seem rather simplistic given the Freudian conception of the unconscious in which everything is ontologically sexual. Perhaps it would be sufficient to content ourselves with Crépault’s notion of the “intra-psychic construct of the erotic personality” which includes, in addition to Freudian topics, the core gender complex, the defensive use of sexuality, the impossibility of associating the fusional and anti-fusional functions of desire, without forgetting the mishaps, remembered or not, of past experience? I tend to believe that the sexual unconscious which Crépault speaks of corresponds to psychoanalysis’ preconscious, which brings us closer to the phenomenological conception of the unconscious.
The third hypothesis rests on the essential role given to the erotic imaginary. Indeed, the unconscious naturally tries to manifest itself: it tries to express itself via the coded language of nocturnal dreams and, more directly, through sexual fantasy daydreams during our waking hours. The imaginary, whether it represents the emergence of unconscious phantasm in the psychoanalytic sense, or creates a contraphobic projection of anxieties induced by the core gender complex, is conceived of as, including its implications for identity, a state of fluidity in opposition to the rigidity of the symbolic and the real. Sexoanalysis understands and uses this fluidity of the imaginary as a mediator between the unconscious and erotic action.
Psychic bisexuality or primary femininity? Far from denying Freud’s still important and revolutionary discoveries (particularly the primordial role of the children’s autoerotic behavior and the the child’s polymorphously perverse disposition), don’t the notions of proto-femininity and gender simply offer another human fiction, another answer to the question which the confrontation with sexual differences poses?
GENDER AND CONSTRUCTIONISM
Twenty years ago, the notion of gender identity, when not confused with sexual identity, was questioned by constructivist or constructionist theories, with (particularly in the United States) the writings of Judith Butler, for whom gender, sex, and the body itself are constructions. The goal was to destabilize the gender and sexual distinction, thus casting doubt on the subject, as was the fashion during structuralism’s peak.
The theories discussed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990), bordering on denial of the materiality of sex and its biological conspicuousness, are tainted by a militant, pro-lesbian feminism which, despite her talent, sometimes stretches the limits of logic. This complex intellectual discourse, whose abstruseness ill-hides her ideological desire to try to integrate Freud, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, could appear to be a regression as far as the distinction that sociologists, psychoanalysts and sexoanalysts have discovered between the notions of sex and gender. All she is doing is re-establishing, using new terminology, the old confusion between sexual identity, gender identity, norms, and gender roles. Perhaps we should distinguish between the core of gender identity as it was conceptualized by Stoller - an unconscious and archaic process - and Crépault’s core gender complex, which he argues is an evolving variable until the age of five or six, but which I believe continues well beyond that age as we will see later in questioning the constructionist and narrativist approaches to identity.
Crépault (1997) recognizes (p.39):
Actually, it should be taken one step further: gender identity created by the resolution of the core gender complex is not constructed based on anatomical or genetic differences between the sexes, but rather on maternal and paternal gender. When sexoanalysis speaks of the mother’s femininity or the father’s masculinity it is clear that these terms evoke gender identities which have already been established by the society’s performative discourse concerning gender.
The term performativity or performative expression was developed by the philosopher and linguist John Langshaw Austin in his work How to Do Things with Words (1955): “This word derives from the verb to perform, a verb with which we ordinarily use the noun act; it means that producing an utterance is the same as performing an act” (p.119). An utterance is performative when it doesn’t simply describe a fact, but rather causes something to happen or does something: “By the act of saying we do something” (p.47). In this sense, gender identity can not be considered to be acquired once and for all upon resolution of the core gender complex, but instead can be considered to be performative- that is to say, constantly being constructed:
“In this sense, gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free-floating attributes, for we have seen that the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Hence, within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed” (Butler, 1990, p. 24-25).
GENDER AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY
This performativity can only be pursued in latent discourse, discourse which is itself being uttered by a body which in turn is being put into question by every word it utters. This discourse is perlocutionary - that is, it is discourse that, simply by being said, causes what is said to come into being.
Superimposed over society’s performative discourse about the individual and gender (such as that emphasized by North American constructivists like Judith Butler and Teresa de Lauretis), is the performative discourse of the individual about him- or herself as told by him- or herself. Human beings are created in and by the language which precedes them. The individual, a creature of language, reaches ipséité (reflexive consciousness of self via language) and continues to become, within his or her own story, the self that he or she recounts over time.
This concept goes beyond one where narration only serves to make sense of unexpected events: narration is the main organizing structure of life and of human action: “I am what I tell myself I am.” Hannah Arendt wrote in 1958: “Thoroughly answering the question: ‘who am I?’ leads one to tell a life story.”
Just as for personal identity, gender identity must also be considered to be a narrative. Over the core of gender identity as conceived by Stoller (as an archaic identification) is superimposed the core gender complex described by Crépault, a lively psychic process which is variable and constantly evolving, constantly becoming. Narrative identity is a constituent element of the emergence of the subject who appears simultaneously as both author and reader of their own life. It is the place where fiction, action and reality are confused and sexoanalysis offers to intervene in this space, encouraging the evolution of the fiction or the imaginary in the temporality of an individual who is as of yet unfinished and therefore still needing to be done.
There are several ways to tell the same story and there are several ways for an individual to tell him or herself their own story, such as when Narcissus looks at himself in a mirror where he sees himself as he says he is. The psychic construction of gender and of the erotic personality is not frozen in the ice of the unconscious nor is it prisoner of society’s mold. The transformation of the erotic imaginary as sexoanalysis views it for therapeutic ends is only possible within a hypothesis of the narrative and performative character of identity. The subject exists, for himself as well as for others, through the continuous narration of an implicit autobiography. Phenomenologically, his or her relationship with time is intrinsic to his or her very existence and temporality only becomes human by expressing itself in a narrative style.
GENDER AND TIME
According to Husserl, the conception of human time is well-known: even though we appear to passively endure life’s events, they are loaded with meaning which depends both on an anticipation of the future and on the memory of the past. Therefore we are not only able to anticipate the future and remember the past, but we can only be, or we can only experience the present, in relation to what preceded it and to what we feel will come in the future. Awareness of the succession of time is achieved with the distinction between successive moments.
In the same fashion, human time only has the appearance of continuity. In actuality, it is “atomized” into a multitude of past-present-future elements that are themselves infinitely divisible: just as a snowflake is composed of identical but increasingly tiny ice crystals. This allows André Bonaly to apply the theory of fractal objects/mathematics as defined by mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot to human time. The image of self (image only exists because of existence of language) evolves, in theory, according to the pseudo continuous sum of these elements: as the subject sees and portrays himself, so is he perceived and portrayed by the other. The remembered representation of oneself is established in the brain via neural connections which change from one instant to the next. These connections are unique and do not resemble each other. This shows us the variability and illusion of what we believe to be the essence of personal reality. However, it may happen that an event, a trauma of some sort immobilizes the subject in the fractal time of this event or trauma, akin to hitting “pause” or freezing an image during video playback: “a freeze in fractal time induces the non-construction of a new future including the event which caused the rupture” (André Bonaly). A lag occurs and continues to grow between the individual’s fractal time, which is frozen on the image of this emotional rupture, and linear time. The subject maintains a mental image of himself which is frozen on the moment when the emotional rupture took place, while others continue to see him as he has outwardly evolved over linear time. Time moves on, leaving him or her behind; the subject becomes anachronistic in relation to him- or herself, the thread of the narrative is broken and the individual experiences a rupture in personal and gender identity. Thus, the young boy abused at the age of nine will experience his gender and sexuality at the age of thirty with the image of the nine-year-old boy he was at the time of the abuse in mind. The same goes for the young patient who was raped by her brother when she was eight years old and hasn’t been able to achieve syntactic coherence in her speech since: narrative has been lost to her.
Narrative identity which evolves over the fractal time of the individual is perfectly compatible with sexoanalytic theory: it provides an answer to (what I esteem to be) the epistemiological and clinical problem of the “transformation of the imaginary” recommended by Claude Crépault for therapeutic treatment. The transformation of the imaginary may achieved through a process of co-creation in the intrasubjective relationship between patient and therapist (Esturgie, 2007 ; Medico, 2007).
Within the limits of ordinary neurosis, the psychic construct of gender, as it is conceived of in sexoanalysis, goes beyond the field of the unconscious and extends into a process of constant creation of the imaginary through the latent discourse of the erotic ego. An integrative approach to gender seems possible according to these different sexoanalytic, narrative, and fractal axes.
The concept of gender appears to be crucial to the understanding of post-modernity. The deciphering of the core gender complex proposed by sexoanalysis, the narrative and performative character of gender identity in the fractal process of the future allow for a better explanation of the ambiguities and inconsistencies of this identity which is a phenomenon whose social evolution over the last few years has greatly increased its visibility.