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Jill Gentile's response to my review of her book (JAPA 68/3) raises two important concerns. One is whether it is possible to oppose a phallocentric, masculinist order—be it the symbolic order of psychoanalysis, the legal order, the social order, or the order of language itself—without reproducing traditional gender binaries, even if one's aim is to deconstruct gender essentialism. The second is whether it is possible to synthesize a Lacanian account of desire with the account of intersubjectivity found in object relations and relational psychoanalysis. Conjoined, these two issues challenge us to think more deeply about what it means to dismantle our phallocentric legal and symbolic orders and replace them with a “feminine law”—the title, coinage, and overarching theme of Gentile's book (2016). As I asked in my review, what makes the alternative that Gentile proposes feminine, and what makes it law?
Although Gentile seems to think otherwise, she and I are in agreement that we need to resist the traditional view of law as located exclusively in the realm of reason, which has traditionally been conceptualized as a male preserve. Like her, I believe the qualities that have historically been excluded from the dominant conception of law, the nonrational sides of human experience, historically associated with the female, are not antithetical to law but, rather, constitutive of another kind of law, one less beholden to the Enlightenment project of autonomous individualism and more attuned, as Gentile rightly says, to the need to surrender to desires that are “not of our individual sovereign choosing.” We—and I include both Gentile and myself in this decidedly nonroyal “we”—call this feminine not to reinstate the traditional gender binary but precisely to upend it