More on Gender Identifications

Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia (1917; SE:14), posited that ungrieved loss along with ambivalent identification lead to melancholia. Butler  uses this Freudian idea in her Melancholy Gender (1995) [see post of 4-14-20] and made the very important contribution to gender studies and to psychoanalysis that unmourned homoerotic longing (unmourned because its loss must go unrecognized in a heterosexual culture) constructs melancholic gender identifications with this lost, same sex love object. [Benjamin reminds us that not all identifications come about through exclusion (repudiation, disavowal) or by abandoned love, but come also through inclusion (recognition).]

Jay adds some interesting modifications to Butler’s ground breaking theory. Jay (2007a) refines gender identifications by noting that not all gender identifications are melancholic and she demonstrates that ambivalence is an important component for melancholy gender to develop. Jay also writes (2007b) that Butler does not take into account the ways homoerotic love plays out differently for boys and girls: “Butler does not make a distinction between unavowed loss [in girls] and preemptive foreclosure [in boys].” 

Heteronormatively gendered girls have, then lose, their homoeroctic longing for the same sex parent; Boys, on the other hand, from birth, are prohibited by heteronormative culture from homoerotic longings and so never have this loss to unmourn. [Benjamin, however, also reminds us that the unconscious, having no capacity to hold ‘no,’ does not deal in exclusions, so even what is excluded is represented somewhere in the unconscious mind.] A girl’s identification (to recapture what is lost or to disavow the loss) with mother -- because the loss of homoerotic love is unmourned -- becomes melancholic, whereas boys, having had these homoerotic longings foreclosed, develop anxiety, obsessive-compulsively performing masculinity lest they appear feminine or homosexual in a heterosexual society.

The ambivalence for a little girl in coming to identify with the ‘second’ sex “... suggest[s] that femininity becomes melancholic, at least in part, because the internalization of the feminine places the little girl not just in a disagreeable, one-down position but in an ambivalent, double bind: on the one hand, she internalizes the mother as her only route to preserving same-sex love yet, on the other hand, this feminine identification may reduce her to passive object status.” 

She notes a different, less circuitous, path for boys: [Because] “boys tend to take mother, not father, as their first love” … “For males, then, heterosexual object-choice is often experientially continuous from the pre-Oedipal through the Oedipal stages.” 

Benjamin, H. (1998). Shadow of the Other. Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. Routledge, New York and London

Jay, M. (2007a). Individual Differences in Melancholy Gender Among Women: Does Ambivalence Matter?. J. Amer. 

      Psychoanal. Assn., 55(4):1279-1320. 

Jay, M. (2007b) Melancholy femininity and obsessive-compulsive masculinity: Sex differences in melancholy 

      gender, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 8 (2): 115-135.