Scouts in the Borderlands of Gender: Response to Susan McKenzie and to Barry Miller

I'm grateful for the opportunity to engage in dialogue with psychoanalytic thinkers whose work lies somewhat outside my customary discourse communities. The clinical practice of psychoanalysis represents one kind of dialogue; the culture of conversation promoted in the humanities represents another. And the kind of exchange that occurs when unconscious life disturbs our conscious selves represents yet another (one whose asymmetry makes ‘dialogue’ an inapposite term). Each kind of dialogue or exchange—between discourse communities, between analyst and patient, between disparate realms of the psyche—provides an opportunity for growth by challenging business as usual, whether it be the business of institutions or that of the ostensibly autonomous ego. I am always happy to participate in a process that attends to other voices, the ones that sound less familiar because articulating something that is not immediately intelligible. Borrowing a metaphor from Susan McKenzie's paper, I see these unfamiliar voices as bringing messages from the borderlands.

McKenzie's resonant phrase, adopted for the title of my commentary, directs our attention to ‘the borderlands of gender’. We also are trying to think here about the borderlands of sexuality and the psyche. Borderlands are the place where one thing shades into another, where categories lose their definition, and where something other emerges; such liminal zones tend to generate anxiety but also intense excitement. As a space of conflict, heterogeneity, and enormous creative potential, borderlands naturally appeal to the psychoanalyst or the analytical psychologist (see Anzaldúa 1987). To some extent we are all searching in the borderlands of gender, sexuality, and the psyche. Yet the papers under consideration here both have their emblematic scouts in the borderlands: for McKenzie it's the figure of ‘Jim’, the secret masculine self of her patient Beth; for Miller it's ‘the man at the urinal’, transfixed by his neighbour's stiff