Metamorphosis, Refuge, and the Gaze: Non‐Binary Shorelines. (25th July 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Millon, Guy
• Is Part Of: British journal of psychotherapy. Volume 35:Number 3(2019:Aug.)
• Page Start: 362
• Page End: 372
• Publication Date: 2019-07-25
• Subjects: Gender -- Transgender -- Non‐Binary -- Drives -- Identity; Psychotherapy -- Periodicals; Psychotherapy -- Periodicals; Psychothérapie -- Périodiques; 616.8914
• DOI: 10.1111/bjp.12474
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0265-9883

Abstract

Abstract : Drawing on clinical material from sessions with three young trans patients, this re‐working of psychoanalysis seeks to open up new ways of analysing gender, in all its diversities. Gender is argued to function as a fetish, screen or trick, that covers over traumatic loss. This application of Lacan's theory of the gaze designates all gender expressions, whether cis or trans, as modes of creative action. Gender, as formed through societal limits and taboos, can also prove constricting in ways that trans and non‐binary people are productively challenging. Turning to Deleuze, Kafka and Butler problematizes oedipal structures, figuring potential resistances and escapes to the presumed naturalization and fixity of gender. The insistent pull of the drive is theorized by Freud as non‐binary, on the boundaries between psyche and soma and life and death; perhaps it is in relation to such a drive that any gender is precariously constituted.