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Gender “In-Difference”
Gender Development in Lesbian-Parented Families
Melanie Suchet
One day, while accompanying my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to the potty, she exclaimed with delight: “I have a penis and a vagina.” Oh, I said, surprised, somewhat bemused but trying to take her seriously. “Oh yes,” she said, laughing with glee, “do you want to see?” She thereby pulled down her pants, pointed to her genital area and, moving from front to back, she said “That hole is the penis, there's the vagina, and there's the bum.” Then with head held up high, she insisted that she would pee standing up through her penis. A few minutes later she sat down to complete her business, while flashes of Freud, Kubie, Aron, Benjamin, Dirnen, Goldner, Harris, and Layton went whirling through my mind. I wondered what it meant for her at this particular nexus in her development to fantasize a penis without giving up her vagina. A month or two before she had told me, quite adamantly, that she was not a girl, she was a boy and a girl. These particular incidents raise several interesting questions regarding the interplay of body and gender. How has meaning been inscribed on the body? What does being a boy and a girl offer that being a girl alone does not? Is it really gender she is referring to? What does she understand of my own relationship to my body and gender? How does she, a child in a lesbian-parented family, come to play with and understand her body and her gendered sense of self? Most important, are sex and gender always the most salient and primary lenses through which we construct difference and understand development?
My intention in this chapter is to push the envelope regarding our psychoanalytic thinking of gender. I have chosen the planned lesbian family as a medium through which we can explore and rethink our notions of gender development. In lesbian families, gender is often used, experienced, and performed differently from traditional gender-based parental structures. In particular, gender is not the primary source of difference. Hence any differences or inequalities that exist between the couple are not necessarily tied to gender. Moreover, if gender is removed from the foreground of difference, as the primary and supraordinate organizer of psychic life, it is possible that other critical variables will come into focus, such as differences in power, agency, and connectedness. As Coates (1997) so eloquently commented, “we have reached a point in gender studies where we need to focus on the function of gender in particular contexts, not on gender itself” (p. 50). This chapter will explore how development can be understood differently in a context of gender “indifference,” rather than gender as the source of all difference.
Bodies: To Have or Not Have, Is This the Question?
Psychoanalysis was founded on the dominant role of the body in shaping and constructing mental life. Relational theory has moved toward reclaiming the body from classical theory (Harris, 1996, 1998; Dimen, 1998). From this perspective, the body is viewed and understood as constructed and emergent in an intersubjective matrix. It is constituted in social and historical contexts. Between mother and child, one can imagine the coconstruction of meaning that bodies come to express. As Harris (1996) so clearly articulated, the body ego is shaped by the holding, looking, touching encounter of the mother / other. The child's body is laden with meaning for the parents. Each surface that is touched, held, or gazed at is invested with conscious and unconscious meaning. “The child's body ego is an imaginary anatomy, shaped by the meaning given by the social surrounding and processed by the child” (Harris, 1998, p. 47). Similarly, each parent's body carries a lifetime of complex meanings, not necessarily verbally symbolizable but unconsciously communicated, transferred into the intersubjective space between them. It is in this parent-child matrix, where the interweaving of intrapsychic and intersubjective experiences come together, that a bodily based subjective experience of gender emerges.
Most recent psychoanalytic theories acknowledge that there are multiple constituents contributing to a child's gendered sense of self. Gender and one's gendered subjectivity are complex processes involving unconscious and conscious fantasies as well as multiple identifications and disidentifications.
De Marneffe's (1997) study of toddlers' understanding of gender and genitals offers a wonderful window through which to begin looking at the construction of gender. She explored how genital experience and knowledge are interpreted by children, what their bodies come to mean to them and how that understanding becomes linked with gender. Her findings suggest that a gendered sense of self may develop quite separately from a genitally based experience of self. This finding is at odds with a fundamental psychoanalytic premise: that the perception of genital difference leads to gender differences. She emphasized that there is no universal, single path or fixed sequence of attaining a sense of gendered subjectivity.
De Marneffe also found that parental naming of genitals, or rather the lack of words to name female genitals for boys and inaccurate naming of female genitals, may suggest parents' anxieties regarding women's bodies. This concurs with Lerner's (1976) dissertation that parents' failure to acknowledge and name the vulva and clitoris contributes to the sense that women don't have permission to be sexually responsive. Family dynamics, values, and attitudes toward gender and genitals clearly play an important role in constructing a child's fantasies and interpretations of their genitals and gender. However, this has seldom been examined. De Marneffe's study is limited by this lack of contextualization and by the use of a homogenous, exclusively heterosexual sample.
Returning, then, to my daughter growing up a White, middle-class lesbian-parented family, we might wonder what it meant to her to say she had a penis. She clearly delighted in the game, in playing with me, in having me on and knowing that she could. In that moment we both knew that she did not have a penis; 10 minutes later she explained that she actually had a vagina and her brother had a penis. Nonetheless, the space to play, to experiment, and to imagine that she could be and do whatever she wanted was welcomed without threatening me or her. Her desire to have the genitals of the other sex seemed more related to their functional capacities and a wish to identify with an older brother. She may have surmised that her older brother's penis gave a sense of greater flexibility and efficiency in the use of the body. It also appears as a playfulness touched with defiance (“I can have and do whatever I want”).
Such a way of thinking corresponds with Fast's (1984) insistence on overinclusiveness that explains Horney's (1926) early observation that the concrete interest of a girl in the penis is very different from a regression to penis envy as a result of psycho-dynamic and often oedipal struggles. In other words, it is important to differentiate the playful fantasy of having a penis from the psychodynamically based wish for a penis. Fogel (1999) has aptly described the latter wish as a fantasy-metaphor or a symbolic fantasy construction. Contemporary theories of gender development place emphasis on relational processes, such as identification and separation rather than genital difference as constitutive of gender identity (Stoller, 1968; Chodorow, 1978; Person and Ovesey, 1983; Fast, 1984; Benjamin, 1991). Benjamin (1991), for example, has articulated the importance of identifications and specifically identificatory love in the development of gender. From this perspective, penis envy is seen as a manifestation of the wish to identify with the father (or the figure outside of the primary parent-infant dyad) as representative of the wish to be recognized as an independent subject, not a concrete wish to have the penis. Tucking his penis behind his thighs, the three-year-old son of my lesbian patient exclaimed, “Look mom, I have a vagina.” We came to understand his communication as saying “My body can be like yours, I can be like you, I want to be like you.” Similar to my daughter's, his wish for a vagina was the expression of a relational wish rather than a concrete interest in possessing a vagina.
Returning to the importance of the familial context, I would like to expand on the notion of the potential space between parent and child. It is within this rich area of intersubjectivity that many values, attitudes, and taboos are communicated, often quite unconsciously. It also holds the potential for opening up a space for tremendous growth and possibility. Fonagy and Target (1995) have discussed this third perspective as a space belonging to both people and yet to neither person alone. In the relational negotiation between parent and child, gender anxieties are transmitted between each participant. I found myself, in relation to my daughter, tempted to simply say “No, you are not a boy, you're a girl, and it's great to be a girl.” With that response, however, I would have been excluding her experience (or fantasy) of being a boy. Bromberg (1998) notes that the degree to which these other voices cannot fully participate in life, they remain alive internally, tormenting the individual and compromising his or her credibility. If health is “the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them” (Bromberg, 1998, p. 186), then it takes particularly open, flexible parents to hold onto the multiple realities of gender, to live in them and in the spaces between them.
Gender: To Be a Boy/Girl/Neither
When my daughter told me that she was a boy and a girl, she seemed to be expressing an overinclusive fantasy that all gender possibilities were open to her despite the fact that she couldn't articulate what it meant to be a boy or a girl. It was clear that she perceived the world to be divided into boys and girls, and she did not want to be restricted to the category girl, whatever it might mean. The wish to be a boy or a girl (or both) is expressed by both sexes and has far less to do with gender than with the wish to be unbounded and unlimited (Fast, 1984). Bassin (1996) and Benjamin (1995) diverge from Fast (1984, 1990) in the necessity of renouncing opposite-sex gender identifications and relinquishing the narcissism of bisexuality. Aron (1995), too, advocates that the overinclusive narcissism of the early undifferentiation phase need not be abandoned or renounced but rather integrated with more differentiated positions. As a dialectical interplay, Aron suggests an integration of gender identity with an acceptance of the multiplicity of gender.
We have erred in our psychoanalytic understanding of gender by conflating self identity with gender identity. It therefore seems problematic to me that one would necessarily need to renounce any “gender inappropriate” identifications to establish a core sense of self. It raises the question of what exactly constitutes the “appropriate” gender identity, because there is nothing inherently masculine or feminine. Gender is not a biological given nor inseparable from the maturational process. Femininity and masculinity are social constructs, and therefore what is considered appropriate is constituted by social and historical factors. Consequently, by advocating a gender identity, we are approving a pathological process whereby gender is split into the arbitrary constructs of masculinity and femininity. I do not believe that one has to repudiate psychological attributes to feel human whether we are male or female. As a woman or man we should be free to own any thought, act, feeling, or wish. Having different anatomies should not have to be equated with having to limit, restrict, or abandon any psychological attributes. To accept without contention the splitting of gender into dichotomous terms, and with it the renunciation of that which supposedly belongs to the other sex, is to accept a paranoid-schizoid solution to a self-experience. There is no theoretical need to have a gender identity or to experience ourselves as gendered. I realize that this sounds like a radical concept. It is, and yet it is not. It has been articulated, in one form or another, by several recent deconstructivist theorists, such as Goldner (1991) and Layton (2000).
Goldner exposed that gender, in requiring the “cleansing” of opposing tendencies, is a “universal, false-self system generated in compliance with the rule of the two-gender system” (p. 259). She claims that gender is pathogenic (because of the way that it is constituted through the process of splitting), and therefore she argues against its basic foundational psychoanalytic premise. Layton challenges the notion of cross-gender identifications. According to her, these identifications are capacities that have “nothing to do with gender and are gendered only retrospectively” (p. 57). She notes that it is gender inequality not gender differences that come to define what is deemed masculine or feminine. For her, the cultural problem is not the wish to have it all, but rather the traumatic prescriptions that are enacted by culture on humans limiting what they can feel or think or do. As a clinician, I am aware that we live in a society in which psychological attributes are indeed split along these two apparently opposing gender lines. In our psychoanalytic theorizing, however, we have not been able to move beyond the concept of gender identity and its hierarchically organized gender categories. Nor have we been able to contest gender development.
What I am proposing in this chapter is both idealistic and political. I am pushing the envelope in an attempt to shift the way we understand gender, its organization, purposes, and construction. My idealism stands in creative tension with the cultural necessity of gendering and is linked to a wish for a transformative shift in our conceptualization of gender. I believe that it is through challenging the hegemony of gender that we can find ways to develop more transgressive subjectivities.
Gender Development in Lesbian Families
Studying gender in Australian schools in 1997, Connell and his colleagues have argued that each school can be considered a “gender regime,” a conglomeration of structuring processes, whereby different kinds of masculinities and femininities are constructed, ordered, and arbitrated. Similarly one can consider families as gender regimes playing a decisive role in structuring and constructing the organization and meanings of gender. There is surprising variability in the organization and symbolization of gender. To understand this fluctuating significance of gender in social life, we can investigate situations in which gender's salience is more muted or even rendered insignificant. I have chosen lesbian families as a living laboratory of an alternative social structure in which relationships and dynamics of power and difference are not necessarily constructed along gender lines, or solely along gender lines. Lesbian-parented families offer us one alternative paradigm (certainly not the only) from which gender polarities can be transgressed, allowing for the construction of a different form of subjectivity in children. Furthermore, the relationship to gender I am describing is not exclusive to lesbians (nor present in many lesbian relationships), but can be present in any relationship.
There are several ways in which lesbian relationships have the potential to move beyond a simplistic, dichotomized version of gendered parenting. First, if both mothers can accept the multiplicity of their own gender identifications, then it may free their children to see gender as not such a rigid, fixed, and limited construct. Women can be active and passive, they can be strong and weak, they can take care of the finances and fix the light bulb. Gender does not have to determine who does what. In particular, the type of transgressive lesbian family I have in mind is one in which each mother is flexible in her gendered behavior. This may involve feeling comfortable enough to play with gender and to have the internal space to transgress and perform less comfortable stereotypical gender roles.
A precocious five-year-old girl wanted her nonbiological mother to be the “dad.” She was drawn to dress-up and role-playing. With friends she would be the damsel in distress, falling in love with the knight in shining armor or she would be the princess marrying her best female friend. Now she wanted a father, and she was insistent. This particular mother, who is creative and introspective, took her request seriously and thought about how to be a “dad.” She would dress-up, change her voice to a deeper tone, and even think of more father-like expressions that her daughter might want to hear. She included her child in helping her explore what kind of dad she might want, how that dad would behave, and together they enacted a mother-daughter /father-daughter relationship. To play successfully in this transitional space, the mother needed to be engaged with her own unconscious identifications with masculinity. She also helped her daughter to see that gender is a performance with which one could play. As the nonbiological mother she did not feel threatened by playing the role of father. She did not feel that her daughter needed a male parent and that she, as a woman, was inadequate. She understood that she could be both mother and father, both masculine and feminine. Once again the distinction between anatomy and identifications becomes evident. Whatever was being played out in the family dynamics, her daughter needed her to be something different for a while, with them both understanding that it was role-playing. Yet that transitional space to play, to embrace different identities, to meet each other, was a transformational moment that cemented their bond and helped the child to resolve the issue.
This leads us into the second way in which lesbian relationships may allow for a different organization or symbolization of gender: in the “potential space” between mother and child. In the intersubjective space that belongs to both mother(s) and child and yet neither alone, conscious and unconscious self-states are communicated. As discussed previously, in this mother-child matrix, there is the active involvement with the states of mind of each “other” in the dyad, a cycle of projection, introjection, and projective identification of inner worlds between the participants. If there are self-narratives or states of being that are incompatible with the parent's own gendered self-states, then the child may experience those self-states as “not-me,” as discontinuous and thereby split off those unacceptable parts of self. If, however, the mother(s) have more fluid gender identifications and more acceptance of multiple self-states (even if different from those most familiar to self), then the potential space between the two is one of playfulness and growth, a space in which meaning is emergent as a coconstruction between the two participants.
Third, lesbian families may interact in more relaxed, less gender-marked ways. In other words, the meanings of social relations may not be interpreted as gendered. Consequently, this may allow children to express themselves without necessarily identifying the behavior as a gendered experience. Children can identify with their parent as a function of internalizing the multiple aspects of their parents' subjectivity and not simply their gender. Furthermore, we should not forget that the process of identity formation is complex. Maternal identifications are not always feminized in the representation of the self, and similarly paternal identifications are not necessarily masculine identifications. Thus any maternal identification may not be experienced as a feminine identification and may indeed clash with stereotypical maternal gender behaviors. I am not suggesting that it is yet possible to have gender-free identifications. Unfortunately, I think we are so steeped in a cultural context in which gender is ever present that all identifications may be infused with a gendered flavor, although the intensity, depth, and saturation levels may have some variability. I do believe, however, that we can move beyond placing gender in the foreground of all interactions and identificatory processes.
After a particularly close and bonding morning with his nonbiological mother, a four-year-old boy exclaimed, “When I grow up, I want to be a woman just like you.” My close friend, not sophisticated in psychoanalytic theory, intuitively understood his request and replied “When I grow up, I want to be a boy just like you.” It was a moving experience to be watching. She understood that what he wanted was not an identification with her as a woman, but with her as a person. He wanted to be like her, and she returned the compliment to say that she wanted to be like him. Gender was immaterial. He wanted to have the attributes of his mother, who happened to be a woman. She did not respond by saying, when you grow up you'll be a man, just like your father. She could accept his wish to be like her independent of gender, although gender was the medium through which the desire was being expressed.
There has been a long tradition in psychoanalytic theory to posit the need for the preoedipal father to liberate the child from the symbiotic attachment with mother. This perpetuates a splitting along gender lines in which the mother is viewed as symbolic of attachment and the father represents autonomy and subjectivity. There is no reason autonomy and subjectivity should be divided along gender lines. Mothers can be seen as subjects of desire. This is particularly relevant in lesbian households. It is the function the parent plays rather than his or her gender that allows for an identification with subjectivity. Benjamin (1995) has argued that there is no need for the intervention of a “third term” or father symbol to break the maternal dyad and help the child enter the reality of the world. Rather, recognition and subjectivity can be attained within the dyad. The third term need not be represented by someone but “as an effect generated by the symbolic space within a social, differentiated maternal dyad” (p. 96). According to Benjamin, father can be viewed as another other, a “second second” but not as synonymous with the third, which assumes both heterosexuality and a single normative form of family. Once again there is a collapsing of subjectivity with gender. The resolution of the original maternal (or paternal)-infant dyad is an issue of subject- subject relations. Instead we resort to the use of gender as a force of differentiation and symbol of subjectivity.
Finally, in the construction of subjectivity, it is not simply individual parents who are internalized, but a representation of aspects of their interaction and relationship. These are complex relational processes that need not be gendered. These interactional representations include how parents negotiate differences, intimacy, power, and anger (Laing, 1972; Goldner, 1991; Aron, 1995). In a nonhierachical, same-sex relationship in which there is no societally legitimated oppression of one parent, the internalization of these interactions can be gender-free. Let us not forget that gender relations are often power relations (Goldner, 1991). Therefore, issues of power between the couple may be more directly experienced rather than expressing power dynamics through the use of gender. We can gain a far more complex understanding of the dynamics of power without the intervening variable of gender.
Conclusion
It is clear that the construction and dynamics of dichotomized, hierarchically organized gender identities can be restrictive and oppressive, both intrapsychically and culturally. Therefore, in proposing that we give up (at least in theory) the false truth of gender, I am suggesting that we contest the purposes that having a gender identity serves. Butler (1990) offers the most thorough deconstruction of the functions of gender and its production in the cultural discourse:
Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform produce and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions - and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction compels our belief in its necessity and naturalness [p. 139].
Butler explains how gender serves the purposes of mandating an idealized, compulsory heterosexuality and male dominance. It is also evident that gender becomes a way in which power, privilege, and various functions are organized between people. It can serve the function of regulating relationships and communications within the family and society. Clearly the meanings of gender are multiple and sometimes contradictory. The salience of gender can be diminished in certain situations, however, one of which is the lesbian-parented family. The presence, significance, and meanings of differences are refocused away from gender when gender is not the primary source of difference between the parents.
Layton (2000) has argued that only by having a type of relating based on mutuality and an awareness of cultural splitting can we produce a transgressive subjectivity. It is worth pondering how development might be different if gender were not the primary lens through which the world were experienced and through which all activities were interpreted. I have tried to explore holding a dialectical tension between an idealistic wish to overthrow the regime of gender with the cultural necessity of gendering.
An important subject for further study would be to situate gender in relation to other lines of difference and inequality. How do the organizations and meanings of gender take shape in relation to other socially constructed divisions such as race and social class? Second, a controlled study with a large sample size would be helpful and valuable. Finally, it should always be remembered that we can never remove ourselves from our sociocultural context. Therefore, even the most open-minded, gender flexible lesbian parents are restricted as the dominant culture imposes its values and mandates gender splitting through unconscious and conscious mechanisms. Nonetheless, I still believe it is worthwhile to find ways to challenge the hegemony of the dominant culture, and as psychoanalysts to never leave a stone unturned. As Domenici and Lesser (1995) remark, psychoanalysis has an opportunity to revitalize itself by contextualizing theory and taking cultural and historical factors into account. It is to the transgressive aspect of psychoanalysis that I aspire.
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