You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Keynote lecture to the 51st IPA Congress, London, UK, July 2019
When looked at from an extra-analytic—anthropological, sociological or historical—point of view, for instance through the work of Françoise Héritier (1996–2012) and many others,† the word “feminine” narrates the story of a protracted and as yet unfinished struggle between asymmetrical forces within human society. The primal division of labour which rests at the source of many forms of domination, exploitation and abuse was from the start a male/female division of labour, creating not just an asymmetrical but also a hierarchical relationship, where women occupy the lower end. For Héritier, it has always been, in the end, the struggle for the control of the female body and its capacity of reproduction. It would be simplistic to consider this element of the equation alone, but certainly this has been a constant and covert factor in the story until relatively recently, when effective methods of contraception, and the struggle around the control of fertility, brought the issue into plain sight. This is a new story, only a few decades old; no wonder, then, that it challenges the dominant ideology by introducing rapid and unsettling changes regarding the place and role of men and women, the nature of gender identity and the multiple forms of sexuality, pointedly questioning the apparently simple partition of yesteryear.
Consider for instance what Freud could write in 1908:
If we could divest ourselves of our corporeal existence, and could view the things of this earth with a fresh eye as purely thinking beings, from another planet for instance, nothing perhaps would strike our attention more forcibly than the fact of the existence of two sexes among human beings, who, though so much alike in other respects, yet mark the difference between them with such obvious external signs. (1908, 211–212)
If Freud could resume his bodily existence today, he would be surprised to find external signs not so much directed at mar