Who's That Girl? Who's That Boy?

Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory

Lynne Layton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135891435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Hailed on publication as "an impressive integration of postmodernism and relational psychoanalysis" (James Hansel) and "an intelligent and stimulating account of where the issues of identity, gender, and difference are joined" (Jessica Benjamin), Lynne Layton's Who's That Girl? Who's That Boy? is a major contribution to the postmodern understanding of gender issues.

This new edition, under the aegis of the Bending Psychoanalysis Book Series, includes a Foreword by Series Editor Jack Drescher and an Afterword in which Lynne Layton addresses the evolution of her thinking since the book's publication in 1998.

1

Introduction

The social movements of the ‘50s and ‘60s—civil rights, the student movement, the women’s movement, and gay liberation—made visible a plethora of identities and experiences heretofore rendered invisible by the power of postwar dominant culture not only to appear homogeneous and democratic, but seemingly to secure consensus on this appearance from its citizenry. Once in motion, each of the social movements played a major role in spawning the next one, for each time a liberation movement formed around one identity element—race, for example—consciousness was raised about oppression toward other identity elements, such as gender or sexual preference. As people in coalitions such as the pre-1965 mixed race and gender Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee rubbed up against differences with “others,” both group and individual identities were revealed time and again to be multiple and contradictory. White women in SNCC, for example, wanted to join black women in a protest against the organization’s sexism, but for black women race proved a more politically crucial identity element than gender at that time. When whites were expelled from SNCC, two of the white women—Casey Hayden and Mary King—joined the student movement, where sexism was also rampant, and they became co-founders of the predominantly white “women’s liberation movement” (see Evans 1979).

These social movements harbored a multiplicity of identities and interests, but they tended to operate within an essentialist paradigm that we now refer to as identity politics. White feminism assumed that there was some identity that all women shared and argued for rights on that basis; gay and lesbian liberation assumed that sexuality defined an identity; when SNCC expelled white people, the assumption was that black liberation was for black people. But as the history of these movements reveals, the definitions of identity that were formulated reflected the interests of those who formulated them. Though these definitions claimed to cover all the members of the group, they tended both to include and to exclude. From the beginning, women of color did not feel that feminism spoke for them; NOW’s early history of homophobia certainly played a role in the movement for lesbian separatism. Each new movement defined identity in a way that would accommodate those excluded by earlier definitions, but still they excluded.

While activists in the nineties continue to struggle for the rights and visibility of people of color, of women, of gays and lesbians, theorists have turned their attention to the nature of the multiple and contradictory identities and experiences that the movements made public and to the way that dominant groups exercise the power to silence heterogeneity both within the self and within the population. Cynics might say that social activism has given way today to an apolitical preoccupation with identity and the psyche. But the writings of white academic feminists, people of color, queer theorists, and others in fact carry on the left political work of the earlier movements, revealing that the ways the movements conceived identity tended to replicate structures of domination and weaken the movements. In the later 1970s and 1980s, for instance, those women of color who never felt a part of “women’s liberation” elaborated striking theoretical critiques of that movement’s assumed white middle-class female subject. In so doing, they not only presented different models of raced and classed gender identities and agencies, but importantly revealed the way that the “white female subject” is constructed in relation to, and in a power differential from, the “nonwhite female subject” (see, for example, Alarcon 1990, Collins 1990, hooks 1990, 1992, Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983, Sandoval 1991, Smith 1984). While challenging identity politics, theorists give identity its due as they explore the histories of particular groups constituted around identity elements: the history of gay men, of black middle-class women, of working-class lesbians. This theoretical work is quite political, not least of all because it counters a dominant mood in the country today to return to the fifties fantasy of homogeneity, a mood reflected in backlash legislation against affirmative action, welfare, and abortion rights; in the racist, sexist, and homophobic behaviors of the “angry white male”; in the hysteria over legalizing gay marriages and in the Supreme Court ruling that invokes free speech to bar Irish gays and lesbians from marching in St. Patrick’s Day parades.

Some of the theoretical work on identity has occurred in the languages of Anglo-American psychoanalytic theory (object relations, intersubjective theory, self psychology, relational-conflict theory). I will refer to this work broadly as “relational.” Some has occurred in the several languages of postmodernism/poststructuralism (by which I mean those that draw on the work of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Baudrillard, or Deleuze and Guattari).¹ And some occurs in a genre of proliferating autobiographical writings in which, for example, white women and women of color locate themselves psychically and socially in relation to dominant and marginalized subcultures (Pratt 1984, Anzaldúa 1987). The legacy of social movements is a tension that structures these current debates on identity: identities are multiple, contradictory, fluid, constructed in relation to other identities, and constantly changing—they have no essence; yet, at the same time, people in groups identify or are identified as like, and they produce histories that lend their identities coherence over time. Are identities then fluid, or cohesive, or both? This question preoccupies academic and clinical theorists alike.

The impetus for writing this book is my attraction to postmodern deconstructions of identity and my struggle to make sense of postmodern theories in relation to Anglo-American clinical theory and clinical work. I first engaged with postmodern theory in Lacanian feminist film criticism, then in Lacanian and Derridean feminist discussions of identity fluidity, and finally in Foucaultian feminist work on the discourses and institutions that produce subjectivity, gender identity, sexuality. There are many versions of postmodernism, but the one that is important for clinicians to engage with is the one that challenges the metanarratives of Western culture (see Lyotard 1984). This version critiques particular tenets of the Enlightenment: the rational, unified subject at the center of bourgeois discourses (law, psychology, medicine, science), the belief that history has a teleology and always moves in a progressive direction toward its end, and the belief in essences and “universal truths” that hide their own social constructedness—and do so to guarantee privileges to some subjects and not to others. This postmodernism makes us aware that categories such as woman are used to constrict the multitude of ways that women can be; that heterosexuality and homosexuality, masculinity and femininity have been produced as discrete identities to ensure the continuance of compulsory heterosexuality and male dominance, whereas they in fact co-construct one another; and that the historically shifting white-establishment definitions of what constitutes a black identity reveal that the construct race is not an essence but a socially constructed fictive category.

As a clinician drawn to postmodern theories, I find that my growing awareness of the fictional status of gender, sexual, and racial categories keeps bumping up against my awareness of how these categories are experienced psychologically. The tension is well captured in Gates’s (1996) discussion of the life and work of Anatole Broyard, literary critic and writer. Broyard, a “black” man, passed as a “white” man for all of his adult life. Broyard accurately felt that were he to “come out” as black he would be expected to write as a black: to write about black writers, about race. His interests, on the other hand, lay elsewhere, in European high modernism for example. The postmodernist Gates wonders: If Broyard successfully passed, was he black or was he white? Black and white are revealed as culturally constructed fictions.

But Gates shows us another side to this story. To pass as white, Broyard repudiated his family, particularly its darkest members. Some of Broyard’s racist remarks suggest that he not only passed, he repudiated blackness. When we look at the psychic and other career effects of Broyard’s disassociation from “blackness,” we get a sense of why clinicians might be loath to regard racial (or gender) categories as fictions. For Gates and those he interviews imply that Broyard’s choice to repudiate blackness made him unable to do the very thing he most wanted to do: write good fiction. His always autobiographical fiction had a hollow ring; it was psychologically unconvincing. On the cultural level, then, Broyard’s life reveals that race is a fiction. On the individual level, the one immediately present in clinical work, we find that Broyard could not so simply choose his race and that he did not escape the psychological effects of race assignment. In a racist culture, race is a fiction that is deeply lived. And often it is in part lived as traumatic.

Until the past few years postmodern and psychoanalytic relational languages have appeared mutually exclusive, and postmodern feminists, particularly Lacanians, have actually been quite dismissive of the object relations tradition. Recent work suggests, however, that some of the seeming differences between postmodern and relational discourses on identity may be “false antitheses” (Fraser 1995). For example, relational work on the multiplicity of identity (Bromberg 1996, Mitchell 1993), the effect on the patient of the subjectivity of the analyst (Aron 1991, 1992, Hoffman 1983), and the recognition of uncertainty and paradox in the analytic situation (Ghent 1992, Hoffman 1987, Pizer 1992) is clearly compatible with a postmodern paradigm.

This book focuses on the gender theories of postmodern and relational analytic feminists, and there are similarities among them as well. For example, postmodern feminism’s attack on “humanism” is in part an attack on the way that the propertied, upper-middle-class white Western male successfully arrogated subjectivity to himself for centuries and denied it to others. This was accomplished via a proliferation of laws, literatures, and medical discourses that presumed that the interests of this dominant group of property owners were coincident with the interests of everyone else in the society, that their interests were “human” interests. As Barthes (1972) and many others in the postmodern tradition have shown, the process involves generating narratives and images that make what is historically class-, race-, and gender-specific look universal, natural, timeless, and mythic. Feminist theorists in the object relations tradition have articulated a similar critique of the autonomous male Enlightenment subject. Their work focuses on the psychology of this subject and how it is culturally reproduced. Clinically, their concern is with the narcissism of this subject, the way the inability to see the other as a separate subject with his/her own interests is structured into this subject’s gender identity, agency, and modes of relating.

If the problem is narcissism, then we might ask whether postmodernism actually offers a new way of figuring identity or whether, like relational analytic feminism, postmodernism is more accurately described as a critique that unmasks the narcissism of the Enlightenment subject—a critique that reveals what a politically motivated modernism hopes to conceal about identity. Stuart Hall (1987), a black Jamaican British academic, reflects on this question by examining his own experience. After many years of being consigned to the margins, he notes the irony that his experience of himself as dispersed and fragmented has become normative, even celebrated, in the postmodern world. He finds himself centered by claims that “identity” is by nature de-centered, claims made by his white British colleagues in Lacanian, Derridean, and Foucaultian traditions. Hall wonders whether “this centering of marginality [is] really the representative postmodern experience” and he concludes that it is not, that there is a continuity between the modern and the postmodern: “what the discourse of postmodernism has produced is not something new but a kind of recognition of where identity always was at” (p. 115).

My interest in postmodernism as critique comes from this same sense that it describes “where identity always was at”—but in very new ways. Foucaultian critiques of identity begin with the force of institutions; Derridean and Lacanian critiques begin with the force of language. I started my history of contemporary discussions of identity with social movements, because the narcissism of the universal subject first began to be unmasked when nonwhites, feminists, gays, and lesbians made their own subjectivities and interests public. Postmodern theories have helped me understand some of the ruses of the narcissistic subject and how a variety of cultural discourses, including the discourse of psychoanalysis, function in tandem to sustain myths of universality and naturalness. At the same time, I have found Anglo-American psychoanalytic theory necessary to understand the psychological workings of narcissism (Fairbairn 1954, Guntrip 1971, Kernberg 1975, 1976, 1980, Kohut 1971, 1977, 1984).

In the following pages, I bring postmodern, feminist, and psychoanalytic discourses on gender, agency, and relationship together in what I hope will be a fruitful conversation/confrontation (see Flax 1990). Despite Flax’s (1990) work on the topic, most Anglo-American clinicians have not yet come into contact with the difficult ideas and even more difficult languages of postmodern theories. In Anglo-American psychoanalytic feminist circles, a tradition has evolved over the past twenty years that interweaves a focus on gender with the insights of object relations theory, self psychology, infant research, and relational or intersubjective theory. While, as I suggested above, there are points of intersection between these discussions of gender and those of postmodernists, the different languages and different presuppositions about subjectivity have made it difficult for the two camps to meet in meaningful discussion. In the rest of the Introduction, I explore tensions between the two sets of languages that are generated by the different assumptions about self, other, culture, and identity that structure the theories. I will look at the following interrelated points of tension: (1) the place of culture in the construction of the subject; (2) subjectivity, culture, and the practice of psychoanalysis; (3) the use of the terms self, individual, ego, subject; (4) the account of agency; (5) the account of the other and the relation between self and other; (6) the functioning of categories; (7) fluidity and coherence. Differences in the way these are conceived reveal the possibilities and difficulties of incorporating postmodern ideas into clinical work. In describing and critiquing some of the differences between postmodern and relational theories, I define the working assumptions of self, other, and agency that inform the rest of the book.

SOURCES OF TENSION BETWEEN RELATIONAL AND POSTMODERN IDENTITIES

The Place of Culture in the Construction of the Subject

When postmodern academics use the word “psychoanalysis,” they usually mean the theory of Lacan or Freud. Indices to postmodern psychoanalytic texts rarely contain references to Benjamin, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Kohut, Mitchell, or Winnicott. An often reiterated Lacanian criticism of object relations targets what Lacanians see as a narrow focus on the mother-infant dyad. Such a focus, Lacanians argue, entails a denial of culture, for in Lacanian theory there is no subject before culture enters the scene in the form of the paternal function or third term that wrests the child from a fantasied unity with mother (the imaginary). To avert psychosis, the paternal function enforces the incest taboo and brings the child into the symbolic, the site of difference and lack (Mitchell and Rose 1985). This “castration,” which also requires the child to assume one of two gender positions, is the founding moment of Lacanian subjectivity, for it is the entry into language that leads to the inevitable rupture between desire and its fulfillment, between meaning and being. A subject is internally divided, non-coincident with itself; only in fantasy is plenitude possible.

Foucault’s (1973, 1979, 1980, 1982) version of postmodernism is a genealogy of the institutions and discourses that produce, construct, and maintain the modern subject, and one of his major contributions has been to clarify how the coming into being of the subject is a process that involves subjection to the power relations that criss-cross these institutions and discourses. Foucault’s writings suggest that the modern individual exists as multiple and contradictory positions in discourse. Rather than experiencing cultural coercion as external, this sub-jected subject internalizes a cultural system of surveillance and thus disciplines and punishes his own body, sexuality, and consciousness in what seems like consensus with the dictates of culture.

Judith Butler (1990a, 1993), whose work represents one of the most interesting poststructuralist positions on gender and agency, has added that the process of becoming a subject with mind and body is one that dictates what kinds of minds and bodies are speakable, what kinds unspeakable; what parts of the body are sanctioned as erogenous zones, what parts are not; what counts as a gender identity and what does not; and which sexual practices have legitimacy and which do not. Butler (1995a) contends that the heterosexual subject is constructed upon a culturally enforced taboo against, and an ungrieved disavowal of, same-sex love. Her contentions go much further than feminist object relations critiques, which, until recently, have had as their subject middle class white male and female heterosexuals. (Chodorow’s recent work [1994] interrogates the “normalcy” of heterosexuality. See O’Connor and Ryan [1993] for a discussion of the long history of psychoanalytic theory’s heterosexist assumptions.) Yet, as other critics have pointed out (Abel 1990), Anglo-American relational psychoanalytic theories, which focus not only on intrapsychic processes but on the developing child’s caretaking environment, take into account the specificity of the experiencing subject in the context of his/her relationships and thus have the potential to allow one to elaborate individual or group histories in a way postmodern theories, with their universalized schemas of power (Foucault) or the imaginary/symbolic/real (Lacan), or “difference” (Derrida) might not (see Dews 1987).

This tension between individual specificity and cultural processes has been much discussed among clinicians who are also gender theorists. Some Anglo-American relational feminists have argued that postmodernists and clinicians have a hard time communicating because they each address a different level of subjectivity. For example, Jessica Benjamin (1994b) has recently pointed out that much of postmodern theory mistakenly equates the subject that is a position in discourse—a construct of multiple and contradictory discourses (for example, “the black middle-class female”)—with the psychic self, the conflicted, experiencing self. Frosh (1994), a psychologist and an academic, makes the point four times in the first twelve pages of his book on sexual difference that gender is both a position in discourse, a category of culture to be contested, and an intersubjective and intrapsychic element of each individual’s sense of self. The question Frosh poses is one that certainly vexes any clinician familiar with postmodern critiques of the gender binary that results from the compulsory assumption of one of two gendered positions: “What can we say or do that might challenge the received wisdom of what is appropriate to being masculine or feminine, whilst also recognising the way people’s experiences of themselves are bound up with deeply felt but often implicit notions of what their gender should and does mean?” (p. 1). Chodor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword—Who’s That Analyst?
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Beyond Narcissism: Toward a Negotiation Model of Gender Identity
• 3 Gender Benders/Gender Binders: A Psychoanalytic Look at Contemporary Popular Culture
• 4 Who’s That Girl? Madonna
• 5 Trauma, Gender Identity, and Sexuality: Discourses of Fragmentation
• 6 Blue Velvet: A Parable of Male Development
• 7 What Is a Man? Postmodern Challenges to Clinical Practice
• 8 A Deconstruction of Kohut’s Concept of Self
• 9 Performance Theory, Act 3: The Doer Behind the Deed Gets Depressed
• Afterword
• References
• Index