Whose Sex Is It Anyway?: Lacan, Sexual Difference, and the Sinthome

Whose Sex Is It Anyway?: Lacan, Sexual Difference, and the Sinthome Allan Pero (bio) The title of my essay is indebted to the play and later film Whose Life Is It Anyway?, starring Richard Dreyfuss. The 1981 film problematically explored some of the ethical and legal questions surrounding the right to die. Here, I will offer some thoughts on the right to sex and, more specifically, the right to gender. The right to gender is, in traditional terms, one of determination—one determined by the laws of the state and those of biology. However, as the work of theorists like Judith Butler have shown us, the discourses of power informing such determinations produce gender trouble; indeed, some would say nothing but gender trouble. As we know, her primary insight is that gender is socially determined, and we are, to a little or large extent, cast in gender roles and are constantly given directorial or discursive “notes” about the relative success of our performances; for her, gender is marked linguistically and theatrically (xxv). Gender is, in this sense, as we have repeated to each other ad nauseum, socially constructed. Gender troubled souls buck against the discursive constraints of genders imposed from without; however, the emergence of trans theory and the greater attention paid to trans people has in turn troubled the particular fantasy of gender as social construction. Or, a more nuanced way of saying it is that we create or produce in cultural terms what we, through repetition, ideologically call essences of gender. [End Page 79] What I am suggesting is that Butler has perhaps helped us get at a particular set of social problems informing gender and its performance, but social constructivism itself has a blind spot, or scotoma, if you prefer: the aesthetics and ontology of gender as they are experienced by people in gender transition. I say aesthetics and ontology because I believe that both of these factors are crucial to our beginning to theorize in more nuanced terms what must be reconsidered—the possibility that we rather hastily dismissed the role of essence in the staging and living of gender fantasy. Of course, I must be careful here. How can one think about ontology, of being qua being, without falling into essentialism? God forbid we return to pseudo-notions like “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.” Instead, we must consider how gendered beings are coextensively marked by something outside of being—the signifier, which cannot be utterly colonized or reduced to the Symbolic; the signifier as such is of the Real, “related to the points of structural impossibility/contradiction of symbolic reality itself” (Zupančič 41). Trans people reveal another dimension of this structural impossibility—the Real is always with us, as an impasse that disrupts our tidy attempts to anchor gender and sexuality to classified bodies (we know this because these disruptions keep happening). This impasse disrupts and confronts us with other forms of being for which meaning cannot account. The failure, then, is that of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, of the gap in meaning, not of a particular person’s failure at sex or gender. So, how to begin? With a small difference. In Seminar XIX: … Or Worse, what is the small difference to which Lacan repeatedly refers? He is of course speaking of the difference implied by the phrase “Vive la différence!” That is, the difference that marks little boys and little girls, but, as he goes on to argue, there is an empty place that informs this small difference. Hence the use of ellipsis in the title … Or Worse. The ellipsis marks this absence; recall that the etymology of ellipsis is “fall short, or leave out.” There is something left out, disjointed around which the small difference circulates. His point is that we mask what falls short in discourse, indeed, around the bit of the Real that necessitates discourse in the first place: the idea that there is no sexual relationship. In other words, it is in the nature of language to fall short. Language perforce cannot say everything, cannot speak everything, much less the fullness of truth. But it does not mean that we do not...

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