Entwined Genders in A Portrait

Abstract

Juliet Mitchell states in her “Introduction-I” to Feminine Sexuality, the Lacanian collection that she edited with Jacqeline Rose, that “no human being can become a subject outside the division into two sexes” (6). So for Lacan, one has to take a sexual position to attain subjectivity, but Mitchell later adds that Lacan always sees subjectivity as a fiction (30). My point is that because one starts, as Freud observed, with the potential for both genders and represses one’s opposite (SE VII. 140), one’s sexual position is always accompanied by the other side: so one becomes a subject inside the gender division. This view is developed by Judith Butler, but it is already operative in Portrait. And it applies to every parallactic division that constitutes the subject.