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Essay on Transsexuality |
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Transsexuality answers to the dream of pushing back, or even eliminating altogether, the limits marking the frontiers of reality. The male transsexual, who claims to have a woman's soul imprisoned in a man's body, and who often demands correction of this "error" through surgery, is perhaps the only believer in a monolithic sexual identity free of doubts and questions. The female transsexual reverses this equation, seeking to identify with the prerogatives - and even organs - of male power. Sexual difference and its discontents owes much to the cultural interplay of fantasy and reality, dominance and transgression, and the questions that put each of us in touch with what makes us strangers to ourselves. Catherine Millot, Professor of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris, VIII, shapes a Lacanian thesis on the nature of transsexual desire. Using the additional clinical work of Robert Stoller and Harry Benjamin, she examines every aspect of transsexuality, from Oedipal triangulation to the act of castration. Drawing on history and myth, she analyzes the theme of sex-change from early pagan and Christian rites to the Skoptzy sect of 20th-century Russia, whose initiation ceremony concludes with the severed genitals of new a depts. Millot navigates skillfully through these emotional reefs, and her explanation is both ambitious and perfectly comprehensible. She offers not only an important contribution to a little-studied phenomenon, but also a credible exegesis of central elements in psychoanalytic theory. |
Part One - From Pigalle to Cybele - She Male / The Female Drive in Psychosis / Keys to Transsexuality / A Mother Too Good / In the Queen's Presence Part Two - The Rites of Castration - Cybele and Atys / The Skoptzy Sect / What Does Mother Want? Part Three - Female Transsexuality - Are They Homosexuals? / Victor and a Few Others: Hope / Gabriel, or, The Sex of the Angels |