Transgender, Hysteria, and the Other Sexual Difference: An Ettingerian Approach

ABSTRACT

This article uses the feminist-psychoanalytic scholarship of Bracha L. Ettinger to consider a relationship between the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of transgender (trans*). Both discourses struggle to articulate a dimension of being that lacks symbolization in the socio-Symbolic. My contention is that trans* subjectivity is metonymically linked to the discourse of the hysteric, and that both demographics are attuned to what Ettinger calls an Other Sexual Difference. Moreover, they are both writing something in excess of the phallic signifier that can, in Lacanian terms, circumscribe the man (as one) but not the woman (as not whole).

Notes

¹ In 1952 hysteria was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

² I use trans* in the broadest possible way to include those who do not identify with their gender assignments at birth along with those who identify as bi-, non-, or a-gender.

³ For Lacan a signifier constitutes the signified but does not signify anything in particular. It represents a subject for another signifier, as he explains in Seminar III. Another ways to explain the operation of the signifier is to say that it induces differential effects relevant to language and the unconscious.

⁴ I capitalize the “F” in Feminine when I am referring to the Ettingerian notion of the Feminine-matrixial.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through Partnership Development Grant 890-2014-0026.

Notes on contributors

Sheila L. Cavanagh

Sheila L. Cavanagh, PhD, is a professor at York University, former co-editor of Somatechnics journal and outgoing chair of the Sexuality Studies Association (Canada). She edited a special double-issue on psychoanalysis in Transgender Studies Quarterly (2017) and co-edited Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis (2013). Cavanagh wrote Queering Bathrooms (2010), a GLBT Indie Book Award finalist, and Sexing the Teacher (2007), awarded honorable mention by the Canadian Women’s Studies Association. Her scholarship appears in a range of psychoanalytic, gender and cultural studies journals.