Gender and “Race” Enigmatic Signifiers: How the Social Colonizes the Unconscious

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article highlights the process by which cultural messages relating to the contingent categories of gender and “race” manage to infiltrate the individual unconscious. The author first discusses the introduction of gender into French psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche and its original expression with the sexual drive theory. He thus explores the ambivalent gender assignments implanted in the child’s body ego by a constellation of seducing caregivers and other invested adults who, as cultural purveyors, inscribe the social. These prescriptions, which are contaminated by the adult’s drive-fueled and overknowing unconscious, are enigmatic for both the sender and the receiver. Hence, they need to be deciphered through the psychic work of translation by drawing on relational, anatomical, and social codes. The author subsequently calls on the contributions of feminist and gender studies as well as contemporary American psychoanalysts in order to propose an “overinclusive” model of the enigmatic messages “to be translated.” This model underscores an intersectional approach to identity categories by considering power relations and cultural patterns of oppression. The suggested analytic grid is then extended to the paradigm of “race” by reading skin-color bias in the light of clinical, artistic, and theoretical examples.