Looks like Dave beat me to it. He raised the question of gender as
being posed in terms of the public affair of the heterosexual couple.
Why is it that gender so often is posed in terms of the conjugal
couple, be it a heterosexual couple, a lesbian couple or a gay male
couple? (Even gay couples are publicly posed as heterosexual in this
case. The public debates around gay male couples rights to adopt and
raise children or lesbian couples having access to IVF, for example.
Single mothers and single fathers also imply a couple or there was
once a couple.)

Both the single male and the single woman are casted in a role of
being a pathology. The pathological single male is afraid of
commitment, cries the feminine police. The spinster is an eccentric.
Any friendship networks and packs are the stuff of gothic horror.

This is one of my main concerns with psychoanalysis. It is simply not
capable of a critique of gender. It can interpret; so we are all
publicly heterosexual and privately homosexual, for example. The
imperialism of Lacan and Kristeva, interpreting a private world of
sexuality in order to derive a public homophobic defense of conjugal
coupledom makes gender inequality and proliferates oppression. To
critique (in the Marxist sense) gender would then involve a
destruction of Lacan and Kristeva's ideals, for example. The
pathological third order of the Lacanian real is simply not good
enough. Can Kristeva be truly called a feminist? (Perhaps, at best a
homophobic feminist, which does have some history.) Perhaps, also
that is what so intrigued me about the malepregnancy.com site: the
parody of psychoanalytic interpretations of castration. It is not the
first such parody; Gore Vidal _Myra Breckinridge_ and _Myron_ novels
taunted with parody such an interpretation.

Psychoanalysis always seems to return to the couple. It suggests that
gender could not exist without the couple. But it is the imperialism
of psychoanalysis which allows this to be spread all over the public
which is heterosexual (no matter what sexual identities you may claim
to be) as a sort of universalism. This is not to say that poets and
writers should not invest in psychoanalysis, castration, foot fetish,
whatever. The question is: what to do with this investment?


Just another thought on this I was having.

many joyous times

Chris Jones.

(PS. . . I have never heard of heroin use causing birth defects. A
light slap on the wrist there for discriminating against illicit drug
users. I'm with the Junkie liberation front!)


On Monday 17 December 2001 10:32, you wrote:

> this is might sound odd to you, but one of the feelings I have had
> from your recent posts is that I (as very paradoxical peripheral
> single male) didn't have a 'right' to speak in this. When I read
> your last I actually thought 'I hope someone like Alison says
> something on this', which she has, most handsomely, I think, and
> in truly 'non-sexist' but not gender-shorn terms.
>
>
> Best
>
> Dave