Letter to the Editor

Thank you to Jill Gentile for her response to my review of her text, Feminine Law (Semper 2021). Her engagement and the opportunity to respond brings to life her argument that spaces of encounter are a vital necessity for democracy and, we might add, a psychoanalytic community built on free and respectful dialogue.

Gentile’s letter offers an overview of her larger project, which includes Feminine Law 2016 and recent elaborations, that will prove valuable for readers of her work. While I certainly agree that there is much shared in our perspectives, I respectfully disagree that my review misunderstands her argument, or misrepresents the risks of her strategy as it is rendered in Feminine Law (Gentile and Macrone 2016).

Gentile’s work on free association in psychoanalysis and free speech in the formation of US democracy is novel. Debates about the power and limits of mobilizing “the feminine” in various forms (as fugitive force in excess of the Phallic; as the renewing semiotic with the power to overturn/turn over the symbolic; as symbolic counterweight to the Phallic) have a history. The vaginal, with its complex relationship to morphology, will always be a charged topic. Gentile’s vaginal hypothesis enters the discussion at a particularly “hairy” time, to use Chu’s phrase once more – a context that does not register in the text (Chu 2019, par. 8). While never entirely absent from discourse, over the last number of years the vaginal/Vaginal has returned in psychoanalytic writing, popular culture, feminist discourse, and as a weapon in anti-transgender attacks. Gentile’s model potentially offers productive interventions on various fronts; my concern is that the limits of this strategy are not recognized, and the text itself enacts some of its dangers.

While primarily a theoretical engagement (one with a strong utopian impulse), the text also produces a gendered politics, and offers a promise of intervention and liberation for women, LGBTQ2 folks and racialized people. Th