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This paper employs Freudian and Lacanian theory in its consideration of questions of psychical and bodily topology. It also seeks to examine the idea of gender as a phantasy, an extended metaphor we inhabit and live through via the configurations of ego constitution. It does so by considering notions of the imaginary and its relation to the ‘“the real” as it is encountered by the inhabited space of the subject. This is then related to textuality via the working of metaphoric structure through and in the flesh. It thereby questions the relation between text and gender, text and bodily inhabitation.
The quotation in the title is from Josef Breuer's case history of “Fräulein Anna O.” and it is to this famous first case of psychoanalysis that the paper refers in order to examine the relation of the space of metaphor to the space of the body. It will consider that there is a direct correlation here with the operative dynamic of the two scenes of the hysteric. I then go on to relate this to ideas of gender and argue that it is not so easily separable from biology, that somehow the biological body is a constantly reiterating sphere of metaphor by physical means.
The separation of sex from gender, biology from culture, has become standard in feminist thought, yet this separation raises problems because it does not question the parameters within which its careful manipution of terminology takes place. In this separation of terms designed to escape determinist or essentialist accounts of en-gendering lies another determinism as our accounts within this framework are written through by a new vocabulary, made to fit a scheme of its own making.