FEMININITY AND ITS UNCONSCIOUS ‘SHADOWS’: GENDER AND GENERATIVE IDENTITY IN THE AGE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY

Abstract

abstract This paper locates contemporary conceptualizations of ‘femininity’ in the context of current sociocultural changes. It is argued that today's biotechnological opportunities have immense significance for both psychic interiority and the lived experience of gender, in that they invalidate ‘eternal’ limitations of sex, procreation and embodiment. An explanatory concept, generative identity, is postulated, to account psychologically for the increasing diversity of reproductive patterns. This concept is proposed as a fourth constituent of gender, alongside the reformulated constituents of embodiment, representation and desire. Derived from this is a further concept of generative agency– the expression of the psychic construction of the self as potential pro‐creator, shaped in childhood by the negotiation of reproductive restrictions of sex, generation, genesis and generativity, and the ‘genitive’ issues of arbitrariness, finitude and irreversibility of time. Disturbances in generative identity manifest as unconscious ‘shadows’ expressed as inhibitions to creative agency, compulsively driven preoccupations with the lived sexed body, and/or concrete enactments which may utilize biotechnological innovations to actualize unconscious fantasies in reality.