Deconstructing difference

"I want to understand Elizabeth's reply by thinking about gender not as an essence but as a set of relations (May, 1986) and to propose that at the heart of gender is not "masculinity" or "femininity" but the difference between them" (335-336)"gender as critiqued and gender as critique, gender as a concept that not only requires scrutiny but can itself illuminate other matters... splitting and transitional space" (336)"The doubled critique of gender I am proposing can, by defamiliarizing the emotion- and value-laden notions of "femininity" and "masculinity," help to peel away what we think gender is (and believe it ought to be) from what it might be" (336)"Deconstructing gender in our minds can help us stretch our clinical imagination about what our patients' inner worlds are like and, indeed, could be like" (336)"the mutual definition of selfhood and gender identity, such that problems of self may come to be coded in terms of gender, and those of gender, in terms of the self" (337)"though selfhood and gender identity are structurally different, their contemporaneous crystallization in development makes them seem, indeed feel, joined at the heart and leaves their relationship simulatenously unquestioned and questionable" (337)"Heterosexuality, even though it is classically (though not always in Freud) the object choice of choice, can and does serve to conceal and express splits in the self" (339)"Taking a deconstructionist tack, I have said that the core of gender is difference, not essence, the relation between masculinity and femininity as culturally conceived, interpersonally negotiated, and intrapsychically experienced. To put this view in developmental terms, one becomes gendered not by learning "a one-dimensional message that [one is] either male or female"; rather, one "absorb[s] the contrast between male and female" (Dimen, 1986, p. 8). In theoretical terms, looking at either masculinity or femininity wihtout looking at the contrast between them encourages us to imagine fixed essences, hard-and-fast polarities. If, however, we enter the space occupied by their difference, we can see clearly other differences that, though not necessarily related to sex, in fact secretly construct gender (Scott, 1988, p. 38)" (342-343)"The difference for women is that hierarchy follows them everywhere they go; most men are "feminized" at work, the most women are stigmatized not only at home but in the community and on the street, because they wear the contradiction of subject-as-object on their bodies. It may be, indeed, that the only time they are safe is when they are with other women" (3345)"Although the idea of a creative and pleasurable tension within dualisms is an increasingly familiar one in feminist theory, its most useful psychoanalytic expression is, I believe, Benjamin's (1989). The answer to splitting is never simply the recall of the forgotten pole of any split but, in her phrase, the tension of holding "the paradox of simultaneity." This paradox is essential to both development and treatment and is a paradox that is potentially pleasurable, as it represents the Winnicottian transitional space where play occurs" (347)"To my mind, one way to describe Elizabeth's sexuality is in terms of a frightened and pleasureless holding to one position, an asexual attachment to a heterosexual identity that is never played out, with or against, because it serves to defend against an inner world in which nips are bites and, as such, too terrifying to enter" (347)"Although, then, mental healht is normally defined by the tirumph of desire - defined as want - over need, I would propose a necessary, creative tension in the space between want and need. How else, for example, might we negotiate Fairbairn's (1952) paradox of "mature dependence" than to feel both want and need for the other?" (348)""Difference," as I have been speaking of it here, is a paradoxical space that selfhood itself inhabits" (348)"I would still make the same case for the possibility and pleasures of gender multiplicity (Dimen, 1983; see also Goldner, this issue)" (349)"If masculinity and femininity were to be regarded as different moments of the self, what would each moment mean to a particular self? What is masculinity? What is femininity? In other words, I question that these terms because, although we can name everything we think they are, on examination their meanings become uncertain. Therefore, I have used this uncertainty epistemologically; if, this paper is asking, we assume nothing about gender other than that it is a socially and psychologically meaningful term, what meanings can we find for it?" (349)"I do not take the deconstructionist train all the way to its nihilist last stop of saying that things are only what texts say they are, that there is no ontology. I believe in the reality of gender-identity experience and of gender as an organizer in the psyche; as such, gender is variably meaningful, a variability that generates uncertainty, invites inquiry, and offers richness. This "diagnosis" of uncertainty, invites inquiry, and offers richness. This "diagnosis" of uncertainty should not, however, be regarded as a failure of method or theory. Instead, it is a sign of what gender is" (249)"Therefore, although gender identity has come to be seen in developmental theory as finalizing differentiation, I would suggest, counterintuitively, that it does more: at one and the same time gender identity seals the package of self and preserves all the self must lose" (350)"we are not always gendered; sometimes, as the orthodox position traditionally has it, the analyst's gender is irrelevant. Analysts dwell not only in the paradox of being sometimes female, sometimes male, but also in that of feeling and being construed as variably gender-free. Thus we enter the countertransferential counterpart of our patients' experience, a paradox captured by Boris's (1986) exemplification of Bion's approach: "If the 10:00am patient is one we know to be a married man in his thirties, we know too much, for how are we to attend the four-year-old girl who has just walked in?" (p. 177)" (351)