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Gender-as-identity was long ago deconstructed by postmodernist theorists. Like Simon and Garfunkel's dangling conversation, identity is now played in syncopated time, and found—with melancholy sighs—on the borders of our lives. Front and center, gender instead has taken the lead. Shorn of unity, conceived discursively, it is likely to be characterized by separate and separated texts: “You read your Emily Dickinson, and I my Robert Frost.” Devoid of bodies, the genders may as well be “verses out of rhythm, couplets out of rhyme.” But to the question, “Is the theater really dead?” the answer is “No.” Gender, we're now told, is the original performance. Until now, the average relational analyst, schooled in the pitfalls of false-self relating, may have found this small comfort. Instead, many have “note[d] our place with bookmarkers that measure what we've lost.” With literary criticism and political considerations now imperative to gender study, we have been left to wonder, like the songwriters, “Can analysis be worthwhile?” A relational psychoanalytic approach to gender is not only worthwhile, suggests Adrienne Harris in her bold new book, but is essential for conceptualizing the paradox and multiplicity inherent in selfhood. Gender, she would argue, is actually coconstructed.
Harris's approach is thus a reply, of sorts, to psychoanalyst and linguist Bonnie Litowitz's (2002) question about contemporary psychoanalysis, but applied to gender: to what extent do our psychoanalytic notions of gender partake of “sexuality,” and to what degree have they been more influenced by what Litowitz calls “textuality”? Harris believes that what we have to understand is in what manner these two phenomena coevolve in an individual and in society, necessitating a more developmental