Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

most pertinently, as a law of discourse, distinguishing the speakable from the unspeakable (delimiting and constructing the domain of the unspeakable, the legitimate from the illegitimate.
i v. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification The foregoing analyses of Lacan, Riviere, and Freud’s The Ego and the Id
offer competing versions of how gender identifications work—indeed,
of whether they can be said to work at all. Can gender complexity and dissonance be accounted for by the multiplication and convergence of a variety of culturally dissonant identifications Or is all identification constructed through the exclusion of asexuality that puts those identifications into question In the first instance, multiple identifications can constitute a nonhierarchical configuration of shifting and overlapping identifications that call into question the primacy of any univocal gender attribution. In the Lacanian framework, identification is understood to be fixed within the binary disjunction of “having”
or being the Phallus, with the consequence that the excluded term of the binary continually haunts and disrupts the coherent posturing of anyone. The excluded term is an excluded sexuality that contests the self-grounding pretensions of the subject as well as its claims to know the source and object of its desire.
For the most part, feminist critics concerned with the psychoanalytic problematic of identification have often focused on the question of a maternal identification and sought to elaborate a feminist epistemological position from that maternal identification and/or a maternal discourse evolved from the point of view of that identification and its difficulties. Although much of that work is extremely significant and clearly influential, it has come to occupy a hegemonic position within the emerging canon of feminist theory. Further, it tends to reinforce precisely the binary, heterosexist framework that carves up genders into masculine and feminine and forecloses an adequate description of the kinds of subversive and parodic convergences that characterize gay
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and lesbian cultures. As a very partial effort to come to terms with that maternalist discourse, however, Julia Kristeva’s description of the semiotic as a maternal subversion of the Symbolic will be examined in the following chapter.
What critical strategies and sources of subversion appear as the consequence of the psychoanalytic accounts considered so far The recourse to the unconscious as a source of subversion makes sense, it seems, only if the paternal law is understood as a rigid and universal determinism which makes of identity a fixed and phantasmatic affair.
Even if we accept the phantasmatic content of identity, there is no reason to assume that the law which fixes the terms of that fantasy is impervious to historical variability and possibility.
As opposed to the founding Law of the Symbolic that fixes identity in advance, we might reconsider the history of constitutive identifications without the presupposition of a fixed and founding Law. Although the universality of the paternal law maybe contested within anthropological circles, it seems important to consider that the meaning that the law sustains in any given historical context is less univocal and less deterministically efficacious than the Lacanian account appears to acknowledge. It should be possible to offer a schematic of the ways in which a constellation of identifications conforms or fails to conform to culturally imposed standards of gender integrity.The constitutive identifications of an autobiographical narrative are always partially fabricated in the telling. Lacan claims that we can never tell the story of our origins, precisely because language bars the speaking subject from the repressed libidinal origins of its speech however, the foundational moment in which the paternal law institutes the subject seems to function as a metahistory which we not only can but ought to tell, even though the founding moments of the subject, the institution of the law,
is as equally prior to the speaking subject as the unconscious itself.
The alternative perspective on identification that emerges from psychoanalytic theory suggests that multiple and coexisting identifications produce conflicts, convergences, and innovative dissonances

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