Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Gender Development

In this time of self and imposed quarantine and isolation, TBIPS’ classes continue on in their communion and discussion. This morning the Gender course participants concentrated on Benjamin’s (1995) trajectory of gender development. Remembering that gender is fluid, not fixed, and that the socially constructed binary (masculine/feminine) creates a power differential within this hierarchy, health, then, is the ability to hold in tension difference/sameness and to stand in the space of the multiplicity of genders and selves. How might one develop such a capacity?


Benjamin explicates four phases of gender development: 1) nominal gender-identification formation;2) early differentiation of identifications in the context of separation—individuation; 3) the preoedipal overinclusive phase4) the oedipal phase. 

Early on, children may have nominal awareness of gender differentiation or [?] nominal identification. With developing awareness, the child becomes “overinclusive,” wanting to possess both (perhaps  partly out of envy) and begins to have identifications with both. In the preoedipal rapprochement phase boys and girls identify with father, his otherness, subjectivity with its agency and desire. [We are here not discussing the otherness the mother brings in adding to the dyad her thinking as a third.]  This otherness of the father now becomes part of the child’s self identity (made up of multiple identifications) and is utilized to aid seeing self as different from mother. Benjamin (1991) states the importance for the girl of this identificatory love, different from object love, for the father, with identificatory love as a precursor to object love. Rejection by the father of identificatory love, or its disallowal by the mother, impedes the boy's identification with the father. For the girl, these impediments to identificatory love may lead to diminished agency and desire. The child, beginning to ascertain the meaning attributed to gender difference, begins to fall to one side of the gender binary. In the early oedipal phase, phallic phase, the binary split seems reified and the other is repudiated. Repudiation heralds loss, a giving up (denial, dissociation, split) of parts of the self. In healthy development, the late oedipal phase can allow for an increased capacity to hold the tension between differences and likeness, and to regain them, the capacity being further consolidated in adolescence.


Stamatina Kaidantzi asks: If identifying with the rapprochement father opens the space for otherness for both the boy and girl, is it then easier for the girl to maintain this otherness for she is also like the mother? The girl is both other than the mother and similar to the mother. The boy is other than the mother but is also like the one who confers the otherness, while the girl gets otherness from someone not like her. The boy does not have a sharply demarcated otherness because he is also similar to the other. This may explain why masculinity is more precarious. Euripides Gavras notes how the (positive) oedipal boy attacks the father to gain the opposite sex love object. Perhaps the boy also attacks the father in service of bulwarking the boy’s otherness. 


Benjamin, J. (1995). Sameness and Difference: Toward an “Overinclusive” Model of Gender Development. Psychoanal. Inq., 15(1):125-142.
Benjamin, J. (1991). Father and Daughter: Identification with Difference — A Contribution to Gender Heterodoxy. Psychoanal. Dial., 1(3):277-299.

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