Sexuality Revisited from Trans Childhoods
Mauricio Clavero Lerena*
Asociación Uruguaya de Psicoterapia Psicoanalítica Montevideo, Uruguay
Submission: October 03, 2022; Published: October 07, 2022
*Corresponding author: Mauricio Clavero Lerena, Asociación Uruguaya de Psicoterapia Psicoanalítica Montevideo, Uruguay
How to cite this article: Mauricio Clavero L. Sexuality Revisited from Trans Childhoods. Psychol Behav Sci Int J. 2022; 19(4): 556016. DOI: 10.19080/PBSIJ.2022.19.556016.
Abstract
The Hopfield-like quantum-holographic framework for macroscopic quantum phenomena in biomolecular folding, integrative medicine, transpersonal psychology, and holistic psychosomatics is outlined. This might have significant implications for better understanding of quantum-holographic feedback control mechanisms of morphogenesis, and healing boundary conditions in acupuncture-based and consciousness-based holistic psychosomatics.
Keywords: Hopfield-like quantum-holographic framework; Quantum biology; Quantum medicine; Quantum psychology; Holistic psychosomatics; Acupuncture; Consciousness; Vital energy
Mini Review
I propose to consider the so-called trans childhoods as a clear example of the assistance to transformations of sexed subjectivities, where the trans universe is generating interpellations to instituted regimes. Psychoanalysts, as subjects participating in socio-historical transformations, can feel called, from these realities, to a debate that allows us to discuss positions of change and permanence in relation to our theoretical-clinical frameworks.
Trans can be understood as a certain allusion to crossing limits, crossing borders, but it also consists of a way of transgressing the logics of cisnormativity, thus questioning the established laws. That character is sexual dissent, which fights against the regime of oppression and demands the need for first-person listening: with us everything, without us anything. In my opinion, it is a challenge that needs to be addressed through psychoanalysis. I propose not to prejudge and transgress moralistic positions, as well as not to display an uncritical acceptance that hinders the work of thinking.
Seven years ago when I got pregnant I was happy, because I no longer expected to get pregnant, being so old, I was 35 years old. I wanted a girl, I said the typical, whether boy or girl was happy. But it was lying to, I wanted a girl (...) I dropped the drool! (...) At 2 and a half years old we bought her the princess dress to go to Halloween and she cried, she didn’t want to. (...) When she was about 3 years old her grandmother bought her a Barbie, as soon as she came home with the Barbie, she gave her naked and came and told me that she wanted to dress Barbie as a child. (...) I was almost 6 years old and he told me “I’m not cute, I’m cute”. It was very fast. (...) We consented to cut his hair, he always asked us to cut his hair but we postponed it. It was cutting his hair, he looked in the mirror and said “I’m a child”, it was very fast (...) I told my husband, this is more serious than we thought, that you’re not going to be a lesbian when you grow up, that it’s something else. Search for information online. See the possibility that she was trans. He said, “Mom, I’m a kid.” And then he told me “I was afraid that if I said that I was a child, that you would no longer love me” (...) I had to assume that my son was a boy, that he was not going to be a girl again (...) I got sick of crying. I had a hard time. (...) every time I remembered or thought about my little girl I cried.
The narrative of this mother is articulated with what Gavilán [1] mentions as rites of passage and sex-generic continuum, in terms of social transit. There the structural character assumed by the individual experience of trans children and the character of social and solemn value that recognition possesses is revealed, which, after a process of denial and suffering, is sometimes accepted in the family and in society with a “new” identity. Every childhood goes through a heterodesignated “identity”, but at the same time these children react against these logics of assignment, claiming an identity that disagrees with primary recruitment. Without dwelling on long disquisitions about the method and epistemological positions, there are two possibilities: to maintain the theoretical model of biomedicine that was established a few decades ago, with its concepts, its categories and the framework of its interpretations, or to commit to the task of opening a new path, to initiate a stretch of theorizations that follows in the wake of what is happening in the families that live this experience and can set the tone to establish the best way to support and accompany, and thus face a radical fact, the existence of children who from an early age, have already given abundant, clear and insistent samples of having a sexual identity contrary to that assigned to them at birth [1].
As I have already mentioned [2], trans childhoods could be conceptualized -taking contributions from Facundo Blestcher [3]- as nannies that respond to “identitarian” forms apparently discordant with the anatomical sex assigned at birth or with the binary generic representations that define the difference between the masculine and the feminine, according to the devices of production of subjectivity. As Debora Tajer mentions: possible childhoods. On the other hand, the articulation of the notion of existentials – taking the proposal of the thought of Martin Heidegger [4] - with the developments of Fernández [5], and Fernández and Siqueira Peres [6], as well as with the notion of trans existentials, coined by Lohana Berkins [7], who calls for going a little beyond the trans nomination as an “umbrella” term that groups transsexuality, is considered key. the transgender and the transvestite.
These trans existentials are enriched with the notion of itineraries and nomadic subjectivities proposed by Rosi Braidotti [8], as a figurative style, a political fiction that allows us to think through, and beyond, the established categories. The nomad is also an eminently critical fiction, hence the author affirms: “what defines the nomadic state is the subversion of established conventions, not the literal act of traveling” [8]. Trans existentialists in childhood take from Braidotti’s position corporeality as a construction of desiring subjects, in which the will for rational-self-perceived change is in tune with desire, betting there on psychoanalytic contributions.
A possible passage from the notion of identity to that of existentials in childhood contemplates the previously developed and adheres to the dialogues between psychoanalysis and queer/ cuir/protocuir theories, supporting the notion of hybridization as a way of breaking with homogenizing processes. Concept developed by Donna Haraway [9] and taken up by William Siqueira Peres [10], which refers to the uses and abuses of the identity category, understood as a device that excludes from the individual in opposition to other markers of social order.
Why Should Psychoanalysis Revisit Sexuality?
In the words of Thamy Ayouch [11], “more than in any theory or praxis, thought in psychoanalysis happens only to the extent that it opens up about the unthought and invites to renew the coordinates of thinking”. Ayouch, taking Merleau-Ponty, mentions that refusing to question categories of metapsychology in terms of new phenomena causes a petrification of the institution and a loss of its instituting dimension. In order for the theory not to become dogmatic and to decenter itself from its narcissistic axis, it has to open itself to the intersubjectivity of transference, contact with the clinic, with history and with other theories. Therefore, all fixed metapsychology is nothing more than a resistance to psychoanalysis [11].
A great psychoanalytic contribution to psychosexuality consists in delinking the impulse from its object and, in that sense, child sexuality is conceptualized as a plus of pleasure, irreducible to the satisfaction of a vital function. Therefore, it is necessary to keep in mind the Foucaultian proposal that considers different forms of psychoanalytic discourses. The warning would be given not to incur in a reductionism of psychosexuality that attends to a technology and that communes with the logic of Christian pastoral care (Foucault, 1976, pp. 137-140), in which the positioning of the prohibition of incest would have as its intention to show that children have desire thanks to their parents, and, to parents, that their children could not hate them, that is, an operation in pursuit of values of sexuality devices.
From this theoretical assumption, and considering the conditions of construction of knowledge of psychoanalysis, it is worth asking: how are the discourses of psychoanalysis around trans childhoods?, how are the conditions of psychoanalysis to generate discourses regarding this reality?, how does psychoanalysis think about trans corpoubjetivities, considering that they are inserted in a discursive plot unthinkable (for some) historically?
Javier Sáez [12] argues that one of the paradoxes of the history of psychoanalysis is that in some cases, the clinic resulted in an increasingly moralizing, heterocentric and normative practice and theorization, producing a reaction of rejection and criticism by the collectives of sexual dissidence. On the other hand, Judith Butler (1993, p. 31) sees that psychoanalysis “can serve as a critique of cultural adaptation and also as a theory for understanding the ways in which sexuality does not conform to the social norms that regulate it.” Butler and Teresa de Lauretis, have provided a deep and grounded critique of the binary character of sexuality, the pathologization of the trans, under the psychotic structure, the primacy of heteronormativity, based on the structural basis and the phallocentric character, from the primacy of the phallus and sexual difference.
Does the Psychopathological view per se insist?
From my perspective, yes. Sometimes overlapping, but yes. In this regard, Facundo Blestcher [13] argues that for a long time the transvestite has been associated with perversion, transsexualism approved with psychosis and trans childhoods as a feminized phallus of the mother. The forms of exercise of sexuality or its identity positions do not define, by themselves or completely, the psychic structuring or the eventual psychopathology. Therefore, it would be a mistake to state that trans childhoods constitute a psychopathological picture per se. Likewise, the psychoanalytic clinic considers that the diagnosis is not reduced to a sum of observable indicators or to the grouping of signs according to nosographic categories. The confidence that is designated to the symptom is established in a correlate of structural dominance, of intrapsychic determination, result of the traumatic libidinal history of the subject and, therefore, it is imperative to depathologize sexual diversities in order to contemplate metapsychological indicators that allow to accurately locate the psychic suffering and the pertinent clinical interventions. This implies considering the complexity of the desiring determinations, the identifying logics of the processes of constitution of sexual identity, contemplating the case by case, inserted in a wide spectrum of sexed subjectivities [13,14].
I echo the question of Butler (1993, p. 270) how could the excluded return, not as psychosis or as the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been silenced, which has been forced from the domain of meaning?
For the Closing...
Ana Ma. Fernández (2013) affirms that we are heirs of a sexual order that responds to a binary, hierarchical and attributive logic of sexuality, not leaving psychoanalysis out. Binary because it fixes only two terms (male-female, heterosexual-homosexual), attributive because it attributes certain characteristics to people who carry identity, and hierarchical because it has positioned non-heterosexual sexualities as “the difference”. This logic has built an a priori epistemic, political, ethical and scientific that has unequaled from the differences the sexual presentations that do not respond to heteronormative criteria. This leads to a naturalization of “different” people as inferior, dangerous, sick, thus building unequal differences.
The various presentations of sexed bodies expand and disturb the stereotypes of traditional devices, building a field of tensionproblematization. Thinking about these trans corposubjetivities implies considering the psychosexual constitution of these childhoods, their life biographies, the discourses of culture, parental desiring production, thus appealing to the intersectionality of trans bodies in childhood.
The proposal would be given on a bet on intertextuality, of the order of complex multiplicity, in which it is not a question of interweaving different strands of a reality, but also of highlighting differences as a specific issue in itself–as mentioned by William Siqueira Peres [6]; cartographies of the transcontemporary that facilitate tracing possible connections of emancipatory processes as opposed to practices of maintenance of binary, universal and ahistorical thoughts.
References
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