Genre with and beyond gender and sex (a psychoanalytic intervention)

Contemporary discourses on sexuality are largely underpinned by the historicist assumption that, as Charles Shepherdson puts it, ‘‘‘subjectivity’ has no essential form, but is a ‘product’ of history,’’ whereby the ‘‘body itself’’ is considered as yet ‘‘another ‘constructed’ phenomenon’’ which, like ‘‘clothing,’’ social norms, or gender and all other of the ‘‘subject’s role[s] in the symbolic order, would shift with the ‘fashions’ of history’’ (85). According to this ‘‘historicist view,’’ Shepherdson continues, ‘‘any reference to sexual difference’’ as not a historical construal ‘‘will be taken as an appeal to naturalism’’ or essentialism (94). Yet psychoanalysis claims that there is a distinction between gender roles, which are indeed historical products, and ‘‘human sexuality,’’ which, ‘‘far from being ahistorical, is both inevitably historical’’ and not a product of history (99). Far from being natural, the human sexual drive is itself ‘‘intrinsically ‘perverted’’’ insofar as, as Freud demonstrated, the ‘‘purportedly ‘normal’ sexual object’’ can at all be ‘‘replaced by a substitute’’ object (86). The fact that ‘‘the sexual ‘drive’ is constitutively denatured, that it does not follow the automatic machinery of the ‘instinct’ in nature,’’ means that ‘‘sexuality in the human animal is intrinsically bound to representation,’’ which is why, to repeat, human sexuality is ‘‘inevitably historical’’ (86–87). ‘‘The distinction between the instinct and the drive already indicates that’’ psychoanalysis is ‘‘not concerned with a naturalistic conception of the body, or of sexual difference’’ (88).