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… this is the mark of a psychoanalysis that is alive: as in a true work of literature, the writing carries within itself some of the charge that provoked its composition and transmits this to the reader who, on the receiving end, must find a way to survive it.
There is astonishing force in Hansbury's essay, making it one of the most innovative, if demanding, pieces of psychoanalytic writing on sexuality to have appeared in the past few decades. Hansbury is committed to theorizing and to helping us think about psychic spaces produced by bodies / fantasy assemblages that do not line up in orderly fashion. These assemblages do not follow the logics of binary gender or the expectation of gender coherence; neither do they answer to the notion that libidinal investments are ordained by bodily materiality. The world into which we are ushered is quintessentially psychoanalytic, a world in which the psyche does not bow to the body's veridical contours, thereby negating the totemic power of the fleshed body. Gender and sexuality, we are insistently reminded, are always already scrambled into each other—sometimes in startling and unanticipated ways.
Hansbury introduces in this paper his concept of masculine Vaginality as a somato-psychic space that offers a counterpart to the Phallic and that, he proposes, is useful in thinking about men, cisgender or not (in this paper his particular focus is on queer cisgender men). For Hansbury the Vaginal is not the proper territory of any gender, nor is it passivity's