TransFeminine law

To the editor:

Sam Semper’s recent review of my book Feminine Law (Gentile, 2016) brings an ideological, gender-political cast to her reading which ultimately creates misleading impressions that I am compelled to address. While I respect and even share Semper’s concerns regarding psychoanalysis’s exclusions and maltreatment of queer and gender non-conforming people, I believe she misreads key aspects of my argument. In Semper’s reading, Feminine Law conflates woman, female and feminine (as well as other terms), and reifies heterosexuality, potentially abetting the forces of cisheteropatriarchy and limiting, rather than liberating, the symbolic discourse and democratic polity I seek to expand. What Semper’s review ignores is that the book is explicitly anti-patriarchal in its aims, and is dedicated to theorizing, not gender per se, but how gender intersects with democracy and psychoanalysis – how they might create radically inclusive and egalitarian spaces for freedom of speech and desire. As Feminine Law demonstrates, the unsignified feminine marks the limit point of free association in the clinic and freedom of speech in the public sphere, whereas signifying the feminine can function to unleash unpredictable, vibrational, emancipatory motions of desire.

The book aims to disrupt a monopolistic-phallocratic symbolic order, dismantle patriarchal hierarchies and binaries, and challenge facile biological reductionism. By failing to symbolize the vaginal, psychoanalysis not only consigns the female body to the realm of the imaginary and objectified, but deprives the chain of signification of the very gap that might subvert the forces of phallocratic assimilation. It is by means of this liminal, feminine gap that novel unconscious elements can replenish the symbolic order, enabling a robust and inclusive free speech praxis. Insofar as the founding blueprints of both psychoanalysis (the Fundamental Rule) and constitutional democracy (in the United States, the First Amendment