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Reading Francisco González's engaging and demanding paper, winner of the 2017 Ralph Roughton Award, I remembered the fresh, intense experience of hearing an earlier version, given at a conference, a meeting wryly titled “Masculinity, Complex.” The play and demand of that title remain very alive in this more theorized version of González's project. Here González undertakes innovative theory in entangling gender with sexuality, doing so through a trip into the archives. The clinical material is drawn from transman Lou Sullivan's diaries, written over a thirty-year period beginning in the early 1960s.
The “Masculinity, Complex” conference was held in New York in 2012. Even after the short intervening period of six years, it feels as if the worlds and words about gender and sexuality have been dramatically revised (and continue to be revised) in deep and powerful permutations. This paper breaks new ground in requiring that its readers view the complex mutative engagement of sexuality with gender through psychoanalytic, sociocultural, and historical lenses. I want to notice and differentiate, as González does, the sociocultural forces and particular specificity of history.
In my discussion I will focus on four issues: (1) gender with sexuality as fluid and as fixed; (2) the social, the cultural with the intrapsychic, and the particularity of history: (3) models of complexity for subjectivity; and (4) translation and writing.
In his essay, González insists that we keep sexuality and gender in “complex stratification[s]” (p. 60). Might we also say: imbricated, intersectionally engaged, softly assembled? González wants us to see, through a close reading of Sullivan's diaries, that desire and identification are always interwoven and co-constructed in ways perhaps discernible, but also