Splitting

In most of my psychoanalytic work on gender, race, sexuality, class, and their intersections within particular regimes of power, I have argued that taking up a position in relation to a culture or subculture’s normative way of configuring social categories generally requires one to engage in splitting processes. The categories themselves tend to be conceived in binary relation: male/female; masculine/feminine; Black/white; straight/gay. And these binaries are not merely defined as “different;” rather, they exist in hierarchic relation: one is good, encompassing all that the culture or subculture deems valuable, and the other is bad and/or of lesser cultural value (which is precisely why diversity initiatives are not the same as antiracist initiatives).

What I’ve generally argued is that when you look at how the categories operate, you find that they tend to legislate ways of being human, ways of expressing emotion, and ways of relating to other humans. In exchange for being loved and socially legible, we tend to take up, consciously or unconsciously, identification with the way power hierarchies define the class, race, gender, and sexuality norms “proper” to where we are socially located. In so doing, we are encouraged to split off other ways of being, feeling, and relating. The split binary structures become narcissistic mirror images of each other, deprived of the full range of human possibility. Culturally ideal norms of, for example, masculinity and femininity were (and sadly still mostly are) monstrous distortions of human possibility. Thus, to take up an identification with the category of “nonbinary,” as so many younger people are doing, seems to me to be at least in part a refusal to be restricted to the ways of being and relating that are culturally sanctioned as “proper” for cisgender men and women. The category “Mixt” does similar facilitating work for those who cannot and do not wish to locate themselves in the Black/white binary that haunts U.S. history