DL_Sexuation and neutral gender
Beyond the narratives that explain the biological differences between the sexes and the meaning of the myths that each one reproduces in their own particular imagination, there is a logic that orders sexuation; the logic that J. Lacan resorted to on several occasions in order not to turn his theorisation into absolute truths. With logic he sought the general principles of the phenomena he studied, highlighting ideas in a coherent succession and accentuating the impossible that emerged within the contradictions that logic reveals. Let us follow Lacan’s thought.
Let's start by defining sexuation, sex and gender to arrive, as J. Lacan did, at the formulas that he isolated in his seminar XX.
Sexuation is the concept that tries to put in order the questions related to the differentiation of the sexes and, therefore, their richness and diversity that come from this form of differentiation.
Sex refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define males and females.
Gender is the socially constructed, i.e. what is expected of a man and a woman in a given culture.
Freud in his 1925 article "some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes" elucidates the non-correspondence and non-complementarity between the sexes. For Freud, the biological male organ would be the cause of this lack of correspondence, which leads one to believe that it is the male organ that structures the subject. Lacan twists Freudian thought by postulating that it is not the organ but language that structures the body.
What happens before the advent of language is forgotten and will be replaced by what happens in the particular history of each individual in his/her encounter with the structuring language. Sex is covered by gender, being the masculine / feminine values that structure, independently of the anatomy of the bodies.
What is at stake in sexuation is not easy. Lacan in his XX seminar (1971-1972) is dedicated to discerning sexual difference following Aristotelian logic. In his book, "On Interpretation," Aristotle explores the relationships between types of propositions.
A categorical proposition is a phrase that affirms or denies something. Not everything that is said affirms or denies something, so it would not be a proposition even if it were saying something because it would neither affirm nor deny.
Categorical propositions establish relationships of inclusion and exclusion between classes, in whole or in part. There are four forms of categorical propositions:
Universal affirmative: All S is P.
Negative universal: No S is P.
Affirmative Particular: Some (at least one) S are P.
Negative particular: Some (at least one) S are not P.
Contradictory propositions (the diagonals of the square) cannot both be true or both false. In Lacanian sexuation formulas, the accent is placed on the relationship that the particulars (the lower vertices of the square) have with their respective universals (the upper vertices). For Aristotle, if all men are mortal, it is true that a man is mortal. It is a way of interpreting the relationship between the particular and the universal as a tautology, since any partition of the universal will be true.
The language, however, establishes another link that EXCLUDES the idea that in “all” there are also “some”. Instead, in that “all” there is the exception, there is the “not-all-are”. If we say some men do not have a phallus, it is not to indicate that all do not have a phallus, but rather that not all have it. This is what Jacques Brunschwig called the "particular maxim." This was a logical variant that Aristotle rejected but that Lacan used to found the logic of “not-all”.
At this point, what does questioning gender imply? It would imply, from the outset, not wanting to locate oneself in the horizontal relationship of the Aristotelian logical square that accentuates the opposite, but rather to locate oneself in the diagonal link that emphasises the contradictions between the universal and the particular.
Now language is universal, so that every speaking being is “he” or “she”. It is the principle of the functioning of gender, which today is questioned and challenged by various fields.
Butler, in 2009, says: “The resignification of language requires opening new contexts, speaking in ways that have not yet been legitimized, and therefore, producing new and future forms of legitimation. (Butler, 2009: 73) ”.
The disused @ that was once used by the most classical feminism that did not bring to question the man-woman binomial, the neutrality of Richard Stallman, the American founder of free software, who proposed to use the vowel "i" in Spanish to neutralize the sexual difference or the artistic proposal of transfeminism that proposes the X as a neutral use are creative licenses to re-signify gender.
The “particular maxim” that Lacan isolated leads to the logic of the not-all, to the exception, to the plurality of identities, to the fluid gender, to the genderqueer that acquire the dimension of performative statements.
We end with a quote from Lacan from 1953 that can be read in Écrits 1 "Better than renounce who cant unite to his horizon the subjectivity of his time”. It would be about comparing the subjectivity of the time as a horizon so as not to confuse it with the subject.
Each epoch carries a notion of generality, of gender, of universal / particular articulation, of traits that comprise it while the subject (and not subjectivity), approaches it from his or her singularity, withdrawing from the universal / particular distribution, epoch / subjectivity.
Searching for that strip that does not belong to either gender or subjectivity, an intermediate territory that Leo Spitzer finds between linguistics and literary history.
Helena Valldeperes