Gender, “a necessary fiction;” “a false truth;” “an artifice,” is assembled and constructed from our unique history of relationships both expressing our traumas and losses and preserving our earliest relational paradigms. Gender is not an essence, not an identity, but is constituted kaleidoscopically by cultural, especially family, messages. Normative gender masks our multiplicity and requires that we alienate parts of our subjectivity, thereby doing violence to the self. The myth of a stable gender, like the myth of a unitary self, is a pathological compromise, a carapace, which limits the breadth of possible experiences and expression. Giving up parts of ourselves, including the homoerotic longings for the same sex parent, engenders melancholy.
Freud, in conflating biology (anatomical sex), sexuality and gender, gave us the triple legacy of derogation of women, normative heterosexuality, and dichotomous gender. The division of normative gender into the dichotomy feminine/masculine sets up a hierarchy and power differential where agency is masculine and where misogyny and homophobia reside. Feminist theory, skeptical of essentialism and this artifical division, claims that the gender polarity exaggerates differences and suppresses similarities. The excitement of the erotic is housed in otherness, in the unknown, not just those of the partner, but in confronting the exotic, unkown other selves in the muliplicitous self.
Goldner, V. (1991) Toward a critical relational theory of gender. Psa Dialogues, 1:249-272.
Goldner, V. (2003) Ironic gender/Authentic sex. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4:113-139.
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