Continents of Light and Shadow

I would like to imagine a dialogue with the person in Dr. Charles’s lecture hall at Hampshire College identifying as “queer” and “trans” who asks, “What does psychoanalysis have to say to me?”

As a Jewish man of his historical period, Freud identified as “queer” too. He existed between conventional or normative categories of sexuality. (Is there such a thing as “normative” now considering we can no longer presume one of heterosexual reproduction?) Living at the height of anti-Semitism in Europe, Freud was “feminized” due to the association of Jewish men with circumcision, a symbolic substitute for castration (Sander Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 1995).

I agree with Charles that sexuality makes itself felt to the female body in idiosyncratic ways. A woman’s desire is not biological fact but an aliveness created through multiple variables, the primary one being a woman’s thoughts and feelings about her own

Page 137

body and the places she claims for it in her society. To my mind Freud’s declaration “anatomy is destiny” was defensive. It sprang from anxiety as his own manhood was brought into question in an attempt to overcome the effeminacy attached to the figure of the male Jew.

Ann Pellegrini argues in Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race that it also defended against a collective unease about the growing visibility of women in Austrian and European public life (24-5). Pellegrini’s point is that Freud’s theory of sexual difference shifted the perception of lack onto women’s bodies and was one of the ways he sought to distance himself from his own racial association with femininity. The female body thus provided the unacknowledged foundation for masculine identity, as Charles suggests; the use of women to this purpose was intensified in effort to temper the opposition between the Jewish and Christian male.

Psychoanalytic feminists give us the theoretical tools to think about how we endow meaning to anybody, female or otherwise. The more awareness women gain into our rendering of meaning, the less defined we are by an external presence such as the male gaze, which makes women the object rather than the owner of desire. Today, more than ever, women are continents of light and shadow. There are means of recouping a female vantage point from within what Charles describes as the remaining “paternalistic overlay.” Art often provides that venue. I think of The Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of female artists sporting gorilla masks that sparks dialogue on sexism in the arts with their poster campaigns. Their best-known billboard announces the number of female artists compared with female nudes on exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The poster image riffs on Ingres’ Grande Odalisque (1814), the reclining unclothed female figure donning an ape mask. The accompanying headline reads: “Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?”

We authorize our wants by knowing more fully who defines them, by giving them words or, as Charles says, by bringing into consciousness what in our sexual experience exceeds words. In this way, we enhance our agency and our ability to choose how we act in and upon the world around us.

Page 138