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most pertinently, as a law of discourse, distinguishing the speakable from the unspeakable delimiting and constructing the domain of the unspeakable, the legitimate from the illegitimate

most pertinently, as a law of discourse, distinguishing the speakable from the unspeakable (delimiting and constructing the domain of the unspeakable), the legitimate from the illegitimate

i v G e n d e r C om p l e x i t y a n d t h e L i m i t s

o f I d e n t i f i c at i on

The foregoing analyses of Lacan, Riviere, and Freud’s The Ego and the Id

offer competing versions of how gender identifications work—indeed,

of whether they can be said to “work” at all Can gender complexity and dissonance be accounted for by the multiplication and conver-gence of a variety of culturally dissonant identifications? Or is all iden-tification constructed through the exclusion of a sexuality that puts those identifications into question? In the first instance, multiple iden-tifications can constitute a nonhierarchical configuration of shifting and overlapping identifications that call into question the primacy of any univocal gender attribution In the Lacanian framework, identifica-tion is understood to be fixed within the binary disjuncidentifica-tion of “having”

or “being” the Phallus, with the consequence that the excluded term of the binary continually haunts and disrupts the coherent posturing of any one The excluded term is an excluded sexuality that contests the self-grounding pretensions of the subject as well as its claims to know the source and object of its desire

For the most part, feminist critics concerned with the psychoana-lytic problematic of identification have often focused on the question

of a maternal identification and sought to elaborate a feminist episte-mological position from that maternal identification and/or a mater-nal discourse evolved from the point of view of that identification and its difficulties.Although much of that work is extremely significant and clearly influential, it has come to occupy a hegemonic position within the emerging canon of feminist theory Further, it tends to reinforce precisely the binary, heterosexist framework that carves up genders into masculine and feminine and forecloses an adequate description of the kinds of subversive and parodic convergences that characterize gay

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