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Perhaps the most critical and poignant aspect of comprehension of female subjectivity does not turn on the study of the nature of femininity, but rather on analysis of the ways in which gender is constructed in semiotic structures and formal language or as anthropological theories suggest, in all cultural signs that make up the symbolic order.1 This article explores the relationship between the persistent notion of sexual difference as founded on male superiority and the assumption that the symbolic order is a male domain without the contributions of female subjectivity.
The word “subjectivity” may be employed from several theoretical perspectives, the explication of which would be the occasion for another article. Subjectivity is the sense of “I-ness” that develops out of all the expressions of desire, will, and felt emotions in dreams, fantasies, symbols, and cerebral language. But here I want to emphasize the original aspects of forming subjectivity as the sense of self that springs from the early sensory and mental interactions between the mothering-one and the neonate. Commencing with prenatal and early sensory experiences, envelopes of communication are woven from the interactions of the eyes, ears, and skin as a rhythm of safety (Anzieu, 1989; Tustin, 1981, 1990). The envelopes act as safety nets for the unformed self of the emerging infant. In this way they lay the foundation for a sense of indwelling and the marriage of mind and body avoiding disassociative states, depersonalization, and derealization (Winnicott, ).
Furthermore, the envelopes of safety lay the structure for projective and introjective processes. Without firm resilient skin