Trauma, Gender Identity and Sexuality: Discourses of Fragmentation*

In the past several years, a number of discourses—among them cultural criticism, psychoanalytic theories of the self, trauma research, and avant garde art—have arisen to discuss the fragmentation of the self, and these discourses can be quite contradictory. In literature departments, Lacan's critique of the ego and his dictum that the self is essentially fragmented were taken over into culture criticism in the seventies. Early on, in work such as that of Screen theorists, this criticism focused primarily on the pain of fragmentation. A core assertion of Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking Lacanian film criticism was that film and other apparatuses of culture conspire to allow a male subject to fantasize that he is not essentially fragmented, allow him to take an imaginary unified ego for the whole of his being. While maintaining this fantasy guarantees that he not have to face his pain, the price of his unity and sovereignty is paid by women and other Others, whose subjectivity goes unrecognized. The theory, which posits male narcissism as a societal norm, suggests that the only way to assure respect for difference and diversity is to acknowledge that we are fragmented beings, that no one has the Phallus (Rose 1985; ).

More recently, other strains of poststructuralist thought (such as Derrida's and Barthes' notions of the free play of signifiers) have crossed with Lacanian theory or with British Cultural Studies to produce cultural criticism that celebrates diversity, ambiguity, and fragmentation. Theorists as different as Judith Butler, Constance Penley, E. Ann Kaplan, and Ellen G. Friedman posit the fragmentation of the subject as a strategy of resistance and/or a guarantee of indeterminacy,