Liminal Space, Sexuality, and the Language of #MeToo

Abstract

#MeToo has advanced the way that we think and speak of sexual abuses of power by creating a powerful social platform in which victims can function as a group, symbolizing what as psychoanalysts we consider unthinkable, while also striking at the inherent paradox that sexuality poses – how to account for the vagaries of human sexuality and its transgressive nature while holding individual and collective abuses of power accountable? My essay addresses such questions by focusing on the way that language fails to hold and symbolize sexuality due to its affective excess and its driven and enigmatic qualities, and advances the idea that the sexual is metabolized in action with an other and not through words and language. Further, that the boundary between what is permissible and what is not is negotiated on both conscious and unconscious levels of knowing, which I refer to as the liminal area of sexuality. I develop these ideas within a post-Lacanian framework and suggest that psychoanalysis must interface with other disciplines in order to bring depth to our consideration of sexuality at its most transgressive as well as to help stretch the symbolic function of language.

Notes

¹ I am using the term sexual as LaPlanche elaborated it: an enigmatic communication that encompasses early erotic experience communicated through the parents’ unconscious seduction of the infant. As such, I am arguing that it holds experience that can only be metabolized through action as it has not been symbolized and/or mentalized.

² Sexual harassment is about power claimed, assumed, and (mis)used by one group (usually male) over another (usually female). It aims to appropriate and control women’s bodies while invading their minds.

³ Jouissance defined as the subjects’ transgression of the boundary between pleasure and pain, and the suffering derived from the satisfaction of such transgression.

⁴ Bannon shoved, choked and kicked his wife during an argument when she was pregnant with twins (as reported in Mann, 2018).

⁵ As per Butler, the performative is always melancholic since the performer knows they are enacting a role that encompasses all the unconscious and unlived sexual lives he might have led.

⁶ As evidenced by the letter signed by over 200 French academics and delivered by Catherine Deneuve at a press conference in 2018 partially arguing Kipnis’s point.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Velleda C. Ceccoli

Velleda C. Ceccoli, Ph.D., is on the faculties of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, The Stephen Mitchell Center, The Institute for Relational and Self Psychologies in Milan, Italy, and the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. She is also on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Velleda writes the ongoing psychoanalytic blog Out of My Mind, and has published a number of journal articles on language, trauma, dissociation, sexuality, gender and erotic experience.