Undoing Gender (43 page)

⁸
. For a discussion of the etiology of the diagnosis that covers recent psychological findings about postoperative regret and sex reassignment surgery’s “success rates,” see P. T. Cohen-Kettenis and L. J. G. Gooren, “Transsexualism: A Review of Etiology, Diagnosis, and Treatment.”

⁹
. Richard Green, “Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment.”

¹⁰
. See, for example, George A. Rekers, “Gender Identity Disorder,” in
The
Journal of Family and Culture
, later revised for the
Journal of Human Sexuality
, a Christian Leadership Ministries publication in 1996, www.leaderu.com\jhs\rekers.

He proposes conversion to Christianity as a “cure” for transsexuality and provides a psychological guide for those “afflicted” with and “repentant” of this condition in his
Handbook of Child and Adolescent Sexual Problems
.

¹¹
. Rekers, “Gender Identity Disorder.”

¹²
. Ibid.

¹³
. See Walter O. Bockting and Charles Cesaretti, “Spirituality, Transgender Identity, and Coming Out,” and Walter O. Bockting, “From Construction to Context: Gender Through the Eyes of the Transgendered.”

¹⁴
. For an impressive account of how that clinic works to provide a supportive environment for its clients at the same time that it seeks to secure benefits through use of the diagnosis, see Walter O. Bockting, “The Assessment and Treatment of Gender Dysphoria.” For another impressive account, see Richard Green, “Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, 1966–1999.”

¹⁵
. Richard Green in the lecture cited above suggests that the paradox is not between autonomy and subjection but is implied by the fact that transsexualism is self-diagnosed. He writes, “it is difficult to find another psychiatric or medical condition in which the patient makes the diagnosis and prescribes the treatment.”

5. Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?

¹
. See David Schneider’s
A Critique of the Study of Kinship
for an important analysis of how the approach to studying kinship has been fatally undermined by inappropriate assumptions about heterosexuality and the marriage bond in ethnographic description. See also his
American Kinship
. For a continuation of this critique, especially as it relates to the presuppositional status of the marriage bond in kinship systems, see John Borneman’s critical review of contemporary feminist kinship studies in “Until Death Do Us Part: Marriage/Death in Anthropological Discourse.”

²
. Carol Stack,
All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community
.

³
. Saidiya Hartman, in conversation, spring 2001.

⁴
. Kath Weston,
Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship.

⁵
. In a blurb for Cai Hua’s
A Society Without Fathers or Husbands: The Na
of China
, Lévi-Strauss notes that Cai Hua has discovered a society in which the role of fathers “is denied or belittled,” thus suggesting that the role may still be at work, but disavowed by those who practice kinship there. This interpretation effectively diminishes the challenge of the text, which argues that kinship is organized along nonpaternal lines.

⁶
. I gather that recent domestic partnership state legislation in California as well as in other states does offer explicit provisions for parental rights shared equally by the couple, though many proposals explicitly seek to separate the recognition of domestic partnerships from rights of joint parenting.

⁷
. See Michael Warner,
The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics
of Queer Life
.

⁸
. For a full consideration of Franco-American cultural relations with respect to gender and sexuality, see the following work by Eric Fassin, which, in many ways, has formed a background for my own views on this subject: “‘Good Cop, Bad Cop’: The American Model and Countermodel in French Liberal Rhetoric since the 1980s,” unpublished essay; “‘Good to Think’: The American Reference in French Discourses of Immigration and Ethnicity,” “Le savant, l’expert et le politique: la famille des sociologues,” “Same Sex, Different Politics: Comparing and Contrasting ‘Gay Marriage’ Debates in France and the United States,” unpublished essay; “The Purloined Gender: American Feminism in a French Mirror.”

⁹
. In 1999 the state of California passed the Knight initiative, which mandated that marriage be a contract entered into exclusively by a man and a woman. It passed with 63% of the vote.

¹⁰
. See Sylviane Agacinski, “Questions autour de la filiation,” interview with Eric Lamien and Michel Feher; for an excellent rejoinder, see Michel Feher, “Quelques Réflexions sur ‘Politiques des Sexes’.”

¹¹
. In Germany, the Eingetragene Lebenspartnerschaft legislation (August 2001) stipulates clearly that the two individuals entering into this alliance are gay, and that the law obligates them to a long-term relationship of support and responsibility. The law thus obligates two individuals, understood to be gay, to an approximation of the social form of marriage. Whereas the French PACS simply extends the right of contract to any two individuals who wish to enter it in order to share or bequeath property, the German arrangement requires, in neo-Hegelian fashion, that the contract reflect a specific way of life, recognizably marital, worthy of recognition by the state.

See Deutscher Bundestag, 14. Wahlperiode,
Drücksache 14/5627
, March 20, 2001.

¹²
. Lauren Berlant,
The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays
on Sex and Citizenship
, argues persuasively that “in the reactionary culture of imperiled privilege, the nation’s value is figured not on behalf of an actually existing and laboring adult, but of a future American, both incipient and pre-historical: especially invested with this hope are the American fetus and the American child,” 5.

¹³
. Fassin, “Same Sex.”

¹⁴
. Agacinski, “Questions,” 23.

¹⁵
. Agacinski, “Contre l’effacement des sexes.”

¹⁶
. This argument forms the center of my objection to Lacanian arguments against the viability of same-sex marriages and in favor of heteronormative family in
Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
(see especially 68–73). For a further argument against Jacques-Alain Miller’s and other forms of Lacanian skepticism toward same-sex unions, see my “Competing Universalities,” 136–81.

¹⁷
. Michael Warner, “Beyond Gay Marriage,” in
Left Legalism/Left Critique.

¹⁸
. Jacqueline Rose,
States of Fantasy
, 8–9.

¹⁹
. Ibid., 10.

²⁰
. See Catherine Raissiguier, “Bodily Metaphors, Material Exclusions: The Sexual and Racial Politics of Domestic Partnerships in France,” in
Violence and the Body
.

²¹
. The Lévi-Straussian position has been even more adamantly defended by Françoise Héritier. For her most vehement opposition to the PACS, see “Entretien,” where she remarks that “aucune societé n’admet de parenté homosexuelle.” See also
Masculin/Féminin: La pensée de la difference
, and
L’Exercise de la parenté
.

²²
. Agacinski, “Questions,” 23; my translation.

²³
. Lévi-Strauss made his own contribution to the debate, making clear that his views of over fifty years ago do not coincide with his present positions and suggesting that the theory of exchange does not have to be tied to sexual difference but must always have a formal and specific expression. See Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The
Elementary Structures of Kinship
, and “Postface,”
L’Homme
.

²⁴
. See Judith Butler, “Competing Universalities.”

²⁵
. Schneider,
Critique
, and
American Kinship
; Sylvia Yanagisako,
Gender and
Kinship: Essays Toward a United Analysis
; Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, “New Directions in Kinship Study: A Core Concept Revisited,”
Current Anthropology
, and Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds.
Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies
; Marilyn Strathern,
The Gender of the Gift: Problems with
Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia,
and
Reproducing the Future:
Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies
; Clifford Geertz
,
The Interpretation of Cultures.

²⁶
. Judith Stacey,
In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the
Postmodern Age
, and
Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late
20th Century America;
Stack,
All Our Kin
; and Weston,
Families We Choose
.

²⁷
. See Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of “ethnocentrism” in
Race et histoire
, 19–26.

²⁸
. See Pierre Clastres,
Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology
and
Archeology of Violence
. For a consideration of anthropological approaches to kinship after Lévi-Strauss, see Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones, eds.,
About
the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond
.

²⁹
. Franklin and McKinnon, “New Directions,” 17. See also Franklin and McKinnon,
Relative Values
.

³⁰
. Fassin, “Same Sex.”

³¹
. Franklin and McKinnon, “New Directions,” 14.

³²
. Ken Corbett, “Nontraditional Family Romance: Normative Logic, Family Reverie, and the Primal Scene,” unpublished essay, June 11, 2000.

³³
. Hanna Segal, “Hanna Segal interviewed by Jacqueline Rose.” Segal remarks, “An analyst, worth his salt, knows about illness from the
inside.
He doesn’t feel ‘you are a pervert unlike me’—he feels: ‘I know a bit how you came to that point, I’ve been there, am partly there still.’ If he believes in God, he would say: ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’” And then a bit later: “You could argue rightly that heterosexual relationships can be as, or more, perverse or narcissistic.

But it’s not inbuilt in them. Heterosexuality can be more or less narcissistic, it can be very disturbed or not so. In homosexuality it’s inbuilt,” 212.

³⁴
. Agacinski, “Questions,” 24.

6. Longing for Recognition

¹
. Axel Honneth,
The Struggle for Recognition
; Jürgen Habermas,
The Theory
of Communicative Action
.

²
. Jessica Benjamin, Afterword to “Recognition and Destruction.”

³
. Benjamin,
The Shadow of the Other,
2–3.

⁴
. Benjamin, “How was It for You?
”
28.

⁵
. Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus” in
Bodies that Matter,
57–92.

⁶
. Benjamin,
Like Subjects, Love Objects,
54
.

⁷
. I offer the etymological version of ecstacy as
ek-stasis
to point out, as Heidegger has done, the original meaning of the term as it implies a standing outside of oneself.

⁸
. Jean Hyppolite,
Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of
Spirit,”
66.