Book Review: Psychoanalysis and Gender studies collide in ‘Gender Without Identity’

Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies Collide in 2023’s Gender Without Identity.

Jean Leplanche was a psychoanalyst who lived from 1924 to 2012. He fought in the French Resistance, founded the organization Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism), and also made wine. He studied philosophy, went to Harvard for a year, and then studied psychoanalysis under Jacques Lacan (who. I suffered through in my literary criticism classes). He thought that gender was “translation” of a caregiver’s energy, which became identity in adult life.

I’m giving a little blurb on Leplanche before diving into Gender Without Identity because GIW can be a difficult book. Its a book that promises to help psychoanalysts fit “macro level narratives” (thinkers like Focault or Leplanche or Lacan), to “idiosyncrasies of any one individual life.” You, queer reader, may in fact not be a psychoanalyst, as I am not a psychoanalyst, in which case you may also need to brush up on a little French post-structuralism to follow along.

Gender Without Identity started as an essay called “A Feminine Boy” which the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (“established by Freud himself”!), in a classic “will they, won’t they,” said they would publish, and then refused to publish, and then censored because it noted how homophobic psychoanalysis has traditionally been. Thus, authors Avgi Saketopoulou (AS) and Ann Pellegrini (AP) found a friend at Unconcious in Translation, a publisher specializing in translations of French psychoanalysis and Jean Leplanche (which is why I started off with his Wikipedia page). So, here is a book that has separated itself out from the “conservative” (we can say transphobic) branch of psychoanalysis, and also draws from one of its more radical thinkers.

To make a long story short, GIW’s thesis is that “all gender … is a manifestation of something else.” “No,” I thought, “I’m pretty sure my gender is just my gender.” Yet, as I tried harder and harder to place my gender, I realized I had no idea where it was. Like that koan where the Zen teacher tells their disciple to find their mind, I felt challenged by Pellegrini and Saketopoulou to come up with a convincing argument that gender was really a thing. Here is their side:

The essay which is the core of this book follows Ory. He is the “Feminine Boy” whose mannerisms have begun to get him in trouble with his family. Ory’s mother approaches Avgi Saketopoulou in her office in New York and implicitly asks her to un-gay her son. This, Saketopoulou acknowledges, she would not do, but refusing would only cause them to seek out another therapist whose prejudices might do more damage to Ory. Instead, Saketopoulou begins seeing the mother regularly to hear about the family’s issues with Ory, and she begins treating, or at least exploring, the mother’s familial history.

What AS finds based on these explorations is that the mother herself faced a similar situation to Ory around his age. She was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household which had conventional expectations for women. In her early adolescence, she began to question her religion; she feared this might result in “being sent away for religious instruction” or even being “turned out and shunned by her family.” AS and AP note how her fears sound like the possible futures awaiting Ory, in his family, if his feminine presentation were to develop into being queer and/or trans. Thus, they conclude that, though Ory’s gender exists as some sort of autonomous energy its ability to be “translated” depends on the mother’s (and other’s) inter-generational messages (please note: This is a huge oversimplification, though it gets the gist).

After 70 pages of wrapping my head around these concepts, this sentence appeared: “Hypothesizing that Ory’s gender might exist in some complicated relation to his mother’s conflict … is not a discovery of what is at the foundation of Ory’s gender.” I felt bamboozled. “Wait,” I exclaimed aloud to my empty apartment, “then what was all that about?” The apartment was silent, but the book went on: “Ory’s gender … fits well enough for him” and “accommodated an interlock of subject-object dynamics required…” Which is when I think I realized that it was so difficult to wrap my head around these theories because they spoke to something so intuitive about being a queer person. I know that my felt sense of close enough, of being a woman, is forced into different packages depending on the situation. I also know that my experience of womanhood is created by inherited opinions. But does that really make gender a product of something else?

You, queer reader, would probably have to pick up the book to answer that question. I still left with a slight feeling of discomfort. It didn’t seem to me like the way that a person is allowed to present their gender is the same as that gender’s formation. Yet, the more I tried to pin down when or where formation might occur, the more I felt totally lost. The book defines gender as “processes of becoming,” as always current and never defined. Which would mean for Ory that he is not a stifled gay or trans child. Instead, his no-gender state, in its relationship with repression, is actually what his gender is.

Is this useful for those of use who want to know, as a student asks in the preface, “What made me a lesbian (or demigirl, or asexual, or trans)”? I’m not sure. When the authors start to explain gender as a process of Leplanchean enigma which “is by definition contentless” they lose me a little bit. Its not hard to see gender as wrapped up with, or a container for, other inter-generational patterns. It is difficult to see how this can help me unpack homophobia in myself or my environment. However, that is not to say the book doesn’t provide those tools, just that it was difficult for me, without a psych degree, to use them.

Enjoyed this review? Check out our Lit page for more reviews and writing coverage.