Minding the Gap: Intersections Between Gender, Race, and Class in Work With Gender Variant Children

Abstract

Analytic work with non-normative patients has received little attention outside of clinical narratives that conflate atypicality with psychopathology. The reflective space that non-normativity deserves is further foreclosed when it co-occurs with pain that reaches clinical levels. In those instances, thinking about unconventional experience gets caught in the gravitational field of coexisting illness. In this paper I adopt an interdisciplinary perspective, engaging the work of those relationalists who speak from the interstices of clinical psychoanalysis and cultural forces (Corbett, Dimen, Goldner, Harris), together with post-colonial race theory, academic scholarship on gender, and queer activist writing to discuss my work with DeShawn, a seriously ill, genderfluid inpatient biological boy. Theorizing gender as a category of experience that can be appropriated towards multiple psychic ends, I focus on the role that race and class have played in his gender's constitution, proposing that adopting an intersectional approach in thinking of how one identity category can inflate others can help us navigate the space between pathology and difference. I detail DeShawn's daily life and treatment in an inpatient unit, tracking familial, racial, and class trauma as I follow the progression of his therapy over the course of 3 years, noting important lessons learned on how race presses on gender, how class inflects masculine femininities, and how embodiment can offer itself as a site for trauma's elaborations. Opening up the space to think up more questions, DeShawn's complex subjectivity compels us to wonder what is the psychic work that is asked of gender (normative and not) and reflect on its porosity to other identity categories.

Notes

¹Racial identities mediated by ethnicity, immigration, and the particular brands of imperialism that stain them do not carry uniform meanings. Rather, they are steeped in taxonomies of history and ideology that are contingent on cultural, geographical, and chronological locale. Consequently, African, West Indian, and American blacks all carry and experience their racial identities differently; this paper deals specifically with black American identities.

²I am using the term “queer” here to encompass variant identities that resist culture's normative regulation of gender and sexuality and that include genderfluid experience (masculine women, effeminate men, drag queens and kings, transmen and transwomen), and variant sexual orientations (gay, lesbian, bisexual and leather).

³The focus of this paper is to theorize the links between gender, race, and class, and as such, a discussion of other aspects of my work with DeShawn and technique issues arising in work with this population are beyond its scope.

⁴Despite his feminine identifications, DeShawn felt strongly about and insisted on the use of male pronouns.

⁵This model of gender contagiousness is not an exclusive property of the 1960s and 70s; see Nicolosi and Nicolosi (2002), who advised that effeminate boys shower with their fathers to help foster a “relaxed, anatomically based identity and dispel the erotization of male anatomy which may accompany concealment” (p. 82).

⁶It is, of course, impossible to miss the sexist implications of such formulations.

⁷I am here drawing on Bion's (1980) idea of the patient as “our best colleague.” See also Ferro (1999) for discussions on using child patients' verbal and nonverbal responses as supervisory input.

⁸Other minorities have similarly suffered heteronormative impositions to gain American citizenship (Gopinath, 2005). See also Puar (2007) for a discussion of a related and very interesting discussion of how non-normativity has more recently, and in the context of the War on Terror, been appropriated by projects of American citizenship.

⁹ Cohen (1999) used the term advanced marginalization to describe how minority groups trying to establish their legitimacy within a majority culture erase their non-normative members. Examples abound: The gay movement, for instance, notoriously marginalized transgender individuals (Serano, 2007; Sycamore, 2008) and leather sexuality (Califia, 2002; Samois, 1982) in its efforts to secure homonormative rights for its members.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Avgi Saketopoulou

Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D., is an advanced psychoanalytic candidate at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is an Assistant Editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues, a Contributing Editor for Studies in Gender and Sexuality, an Adjunct Clinical Supervisor at Long Island University, and a recipient of the Ruth Stein Prize.