Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

York Norton, 1985), originally published as L’ideal du moi. Her text engages a nave developmental model of sexuality that degrades homosexuality and regularly engages a polemic against feminism and Lacan.
37. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality,Volume Ii p. 81.
38. Roy Schafer, A New Language for Psycho-Analysis, (New Haven Yale
University Press, 1976), p. 162. Also of interest are Schafer’s earlier distinctions among various sorts of internalizations—introjection, incorporation, identification—in Roy Schafer, Aspects of Internalization (New York:
International Universities Press, 1968). Fora psychoanalytic history of the terms internalization and identification, see WW. Meissner, Internal-
ization in Psychoanalysis (New York International Universities Press. This discussion of Abraham and Torok is based on “Deuil ou mélancholie,
introjecter-incorporer, réalité métapsychologique et fantasme,” in
L’Écorce et le noyau, (Paris: Flammarion, 1987) translated as The Shell and
the Kernel Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed., trans, and with intro by
Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1994). Part of this discussion is also to be found in English as Nicolas Abraham and
Maria Torok, “Introjection-Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia in
Psychoanalysis in France, eds. Serge Lebovici and Daniel Widlocher (New
York: International University Press, 1980), pp. 3–16. See also by the same authors, Notes on the Phantom A Complement to Freud’s
Metapsychology,” in The Trials) of Psychoanalysis, ed. Francoise Meltzer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 75–80; and A Poetics of Psychoanalysis The Lost Object-Me,’” Substance, Vol. 43, 1984, pp. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 68.
41. See Schafer, A New Language for Psychoanalysis, p. 177. In this and in his earlier work, Aspects of Internalization, Schaefer makes clear that the tropes of internalized spaces are phantasmatic constructions, but not processes.
This clearly coincides in an interesting way with the thesis put forward by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok that Incorporation is merely a fantasy that reassures the ego (“Introjection-Incorporation,” p. 5).
42. Clearly, this is the theoretical foundation of Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian
Body, trans. Peter Owen (New York Avon, 1976), which suggests that the heterosexualized female body is compartmentalized and rendered sexu-
Gender Trouble
208

ally unresponsive. The dismembering and remembering process of that body through lesbian lovemaking performs the inversion that reveals the so-called integrated body as fully disintegrated and deeroticized and the literally disintegrated body as capable of sexual pleasure throughout the surfaces of the body. Significantly, there are no stable surfaces on these bodies, for the political principle of compulsory heterosexuality is understood to determine what counts as a whole, completed, and anatomically discrete body. Wittig’s narrative (which is at once an anti- narrative) brings those culturally constructed notions of bodily integrity into question. This notion of the surface of the body as projected is partially addressed by Freud’s own concept of the bodily ego Freud’s claim that the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego (The Ego and the Id, p. 16) suggests that there is a concept of the body that determines ego-development.
Freud continues the above sentence the body is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface For an interesting discussion of Freud’s view, see Richard Wollheim, The bodily ego in
Philosophical Essays on Freud, eds. Richard Wollheim and James Hopkins
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Fora provocative account of the skin ego which, unfortunately, does not consider the implications of its account for the sexed body, see Didier Anzieu, Le moi-

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