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“There are two, and only two, sexes!” asserts defiantly, and very much against the grain of postmodern Anglo-American gender theory, this new, thoroughly wide-ranging but uneven volume on the Lacanian theory of sexuation and its cultural, political, and ethical consequences. A warning, however: Before jumping to the over-hasty conclusion that this declaration subtends reactionary, homophobic, and both theoretically and scientifically naive assumptions about either the “nature” or “social construction” of human sexuality, it would be wise to pause for a moment to appreciate what exactly these Lacanians are trying to get across with their notion of “sexuation,” and to realize that, in order to understand this idea on its own terms, much of what contemporary feminist and queer theories now routinely take for granted—more specifically, their conceptual reliance on social constructionism as well as the related sex and gender binary and the cultural “deconstruction” of gender—must be held up to further analytic scrutiny.
As is undoubtedly already quite apparent, I find myself to a very large extent sympathetic to what this anthology, very polemically, one might add, attempts to assert. Nevertheless, I find it necessary, before delving into the anthology itself, to express two reservations. First, though ethically admirable and undoubtedly politically necessary to a significant degree, the strategy of the Lacanian collective to circumscribe its discussion of sexuation within the exclusive domain of Lacanian theory itself has the danger of perpetuating the misunderstandings that have plagued the Anglo-American reception of Lacan, particularly in feminist and antihomophobic circles. Now the alternative, in my view, is not a politically correct form of “dialogue” between antagonistic theoretical camps. What remains possible, nonetheless, is a thoroughgoing analysis of the differing assumptions that structure the Lacanian and deconstructionist-culturalist views of sex and sexua