Transsexuality as Sinthome: Bracha L. Ettinger and the Other (Feminine) Sexual Difference

ABSTRACT

This article uses Bracha L. Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial borderspace in relation to Jacques Lacan’s analytic of sexuation to argue that transsexuality isn’t reducible to psychosis. Rather, transsexuality taps into an Other (feminine) sexual difference that is subjectifying and can be understood in relation to Ettinger’s conception of metramorphosis and the matrixial. Transsexuality involves the somatization of the Other sexual difference and the creative use of this difference as sinthome. The sinthome of transsexuality can enable the subject to negotiate the aporia of sexual difference. I establish parallels between the (neurotic) hysteric and the transsexual to argue that transsexuality can be a subset of neurosis. The transsexual transition (which often involves Sex Reassignment Surgery) can be understood as a metramorphical becoming, a borderlinking enabling separation and distance in proximity. It is not as Catherine Millot (1990) contends an attempt to abolish the “nature” of the Real but rather a means to achieve a sinthomatic reknotting of the 3 Registers such that one’s relation to a parental image and to an Other’s primordial traces can be reconfigured.

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Grant number PDG 890-2014-0026].

Acknowledgment

I wish to acknowledge the intellectual contributions made by Caitlin Janzen.

Notes

¹ Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911) was a German judge who wrote an influential book titled Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (2000). Schreber lived with dementia praecox and his case was analyzed by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.

² Colette Soler (2002) argues that for Freud there is no feminine mark of difference in the unconscious.

³ There is a (dis)similar axis of difference operating in the phallic stratum whereby boys and girls are subject to symbolic castration. Boys give up what they allegedly have (the phallus) under the paternal function and girls must “renounce what they do not have” (Ettinger, 1997, p. 373) and what is, consequently, not part of their bodily schemata. In the phallic stratum men deal with the anxiety of having/not having the phallus while women deal with the question of being/not being.

⁴ Freud (1997) was confounded by the question of what a woman wants because his understanding of the feminine was confined to the phallic frame. His focus was thus on hysteria in women (in the case of Dora, for example), which is a defensive response to the positioning of the feminine in a phallic economy. Hysteria is impossible in the matrixial and occurs in the Symbolic when a “woman can’t give meaning to a nonphallic feminine difference” (Ettinger, 2006, p. 57). Desire au féminin (Ettinger, 2006, p. 184) is foreclosed. In other words, hysteria is only thinkable in the phallic stratum when subjects have been sexuated as men or as women.

⁵ In Lacan’s sexuation graphs one is either sexuated in the masculine or feminine position. This positioning isn’t determined by biology but rather by one’s relation to the Other and by one’s jouissance.

⁶ One of the limits of Lacanian theorizing on transsexuality is that differences between trans men and trans women are often obfuscated. It is thus difficult to know how divergent sexuated positions impact upon transsexual subjects. Much attention has been given to the so-called Push-Toward-Woman (modeled upon the Schreber case analyzed by Lacan), but how might we understand a push-toward-Man given that, according to Freud, “regardless of one’s sex, the opposite sex is always female” (Gherovici, 2010, p. 179)?

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Grant number PDG 890-2014-0026].

Notes on contributors

Sheila L. Cavanagh

Sheila L. Cavanagh, Ph.D., specializes in gender and sexuality studies with a focus on queer and psychoanalytic theories. She is an associate professor of sociology and former sexuality studies coordinator at York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.