The 

From and the Content of Some Claims about Sex

Anton Cu Unjieng

ARTH 571: The Other Methods
Dr. Ignacio Adriasola Munoz
19 Dec 2018
 I

As part of Illusions, Greg Payce’s 2012 retrospective, three thrown pots were placed at the

entrance of the Gardner Museum.1 The three forms were arranged in a line rim-to-rim so that between

the center vessel and each of the other two there was created a negative space. These spaces, drawn by

the profiles of the vessels, in their turn presented the profiles of two children facing each other across

the expanse of the central vessel. Amy Gogarty, a critic who has written on Payce for much of his

career, once remarked that “he invokes the figure as an absence through his arrangements”2 but it is

also worth noting that this absence is itself invoked by presence: the heavy material presence of the

ceramic objects themselves. These are figures drawn entirely by their relationship to what is outside of

them: every feature that we see is literally defined by (and is, in fact, nothing other than) the curves of

the vessels. You could, if you were in a Heidegger-ian mood, go off at this point about how the vessels

themselves are defined by the spaces they create. Instead I want just to emphasize the ontological

relation of these figures to what is external to them and from here to point to one more externality: our

perception. The figures result not just from the arrangements of the vessels but also out of our ability to

cohere the negative space into an object of perception – out of the judgment of our eyes, out of what we

do with what we see, and out of what we see. Because of their arrangement, the profile of the central

vessel performs double duty limning the fronts of both children, this necessarily means that their fronts

are identical – and as it happens identically lacking any indication as to their genitals. Nevertheless, the

two children are not identical: one figure is just a little slimmer than the other; one figure’s back is

articulated with a slightly more pronounced curve than the other; one figure’s buttocks is just a little

more round and lifted than the others; one figure sports a little bob coif while the other appears to be
1 I should note that I have written an experimental essay on Payce before, this took the form of a blog which may be
viewed here: https://antoncuunjieng.tumblr.com/. Some of the arguments presented for this paper take are expansions or
condensations of arguments developed in that paper.
2 Amy Gogarty, “Jeanie Mah and Greg Payce: cineramics” in Ceramics: Art and Perception, 46 (2001), 72-79.

1
bald. It will come as no surprise that these figures are usually seen as a little girl and boy respectively.

The title of this arrangement: Apparently (1999).

In use, ‘appear’ with its derivative forms, like heimlich, belongs to that strange class of words

called contranyms – also, fittingly enough, called Janus words: words that are their own opposites.

Hence it can describe a truth that is obvious and easily discernible; on the other hand, it can refer to

appearances that in fact dissemble some hidden or less obvious truth; and this also explains its third

usage, that of referring to appearances that may or may not disclose a real state of affairs. Hence the

statements:

It was always apparent that Trudeau never intended to effectively combat climate change;

Trump only appears to be an incompetent loon; and

The Darwin’s frog is apparently extinct

all use appearance to mean quite different things. The sex of each of Apparently’s children is ‘apparent’

in all three of these senses. Obvious just from looking, or rather, we must clearly consider them sexless,

or, really, we ought to be agnostic about it.

Nevertheless, there is a tendency, when confronted by the various figures Payce draws in this

way, to treat their forms not as a warning about the ambiguities of the body, but rather as luminous and

transparent signs. Hence, describing two other works, Gogarty writes: “Clair (2010) delineates a

standing female, who glows against the dark powder-coated aluminum balusters that contain her. …

Claire radiates a feminine spirit of healing and hope.”3 Meanwhile, “The imposing male figure David

(2006) similarly exudes strength and purpose.”4 It is really rather a lot to read into two figures standing

in profile absolutely straight and lacking any internal features whatsoever. If the body is a sign, perhaps

we should still be more circumspect about thinking we know how to read it.

3 Amy Gogarty, “Greg Payce: Illusion, Remediation, and the Pluriverse” in Greg Payce: Illusions (Toronto: The Gardiner
Museum, 2011), 15.
4 Ibid.

2
 As it happens, Claire cuts a more ambiguous figure than Gogarty’s description quite lets on.

The aluminum column that describes her front also gives her a small lump at exactly crotch level, as far

as I know none of Payce’s critics have remarked upon it. It may, of course, be her hand – the nature of

this kind of ‘drawing’ in negative space is such that her arm is necessarily invisible. But then, it may be

a penis. Naturally, this is no reason not to read Claire as female, or even as radiating the very spirit of

femininity – since the task of radiating such a spirit is, after all, impossible, a trans woman is just as

unsuited for the job as a cis woman. Whether or not Gogarty would concede to such a point, I can make

no guesses, what is apparent is that the very transparency of Payce’s figures ought to key us to what

they make unknowable. Perhaps this is a cis woman, perhaps this is a trans woman, on the other hand,

perhaps this body does indeed have a vagina but is also sporting a modest pack and play dildo. It is far

less interesting to guess at Payce’s intentions (a cynical operation) than it is to keep in mind all the

different kinds of bodies that might appear before us bearing this profile – and, more urgently, to keep

in mind that this profile would tell us very little about the ‘spirit’ of the person in possession of this

body.

The biologist, gender theorist, and trans activist, Julia Serano offers this basic caution: “when it

comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient”.5 She points out, moreover, that “our genders and

sexualities arise from an unfathomably complex interaction between a variety of biological, social, and

environmental factors.”6 I take this to imply that there is always something of the unfathomable to sex.

I would like to suggest a more thorough expansion of Serano’s point: our understanding of sex is, by

the very nature of the phenomenon, always inadequate to it. Hence, sex describes ways of being that,

even if we can sometimes name them, are never fully within our grasp – and that, moreover, this escape

is part of the nature of the phenomenon in question.

5 Julia Serano, Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Exclusive (Berkley: Seal Press, 2013), p. 107.
6 Ibid., 135.

3
 In spite of agreeing with Serano’s suggestion, and in fact wanting to take it further, I think that

the way in which she formulates the question tends to preclude the possibility of ordering the factors in

she names. By simply listing the biological, the social, and the environmental within an unfathomable

complexity, she implies that if we could simply get better at thinking complexity we could render sex

fathomable. I suspect that the opposite is the case – that the better able we become at understanding the

actual nature of the relationships that exist between her three factors, the more we would see why sex

itself builds a certain unknowable-ness into its nature. Obviously, this is very much beyond my

capacity to prove, for now, I can only take it as a kind of postulate. What I want to do here is examine

aspects of Freud’s approach to understanding sex, to point to the limits at which the language itself

breaks down and is forced to throw up its hands, then to consider two related critiques that further

illuminate these limitations and point to some questions that differ from Freud’s in significant and

useful ways.

II

Pantheon (2004) is made up of forty thrown and rearrangeable vessels that use both positive

and negative profiles to describe human figures – adults this time. The result is an almost orgiastic

generation and disassembly of bodies. Figures are drawn with two backs or two fronts; a profile of one

figure will be drawn in the negative only to be enclosed by a positive one; a figure drawn in negative

space will frame another figure within it; or else the strange silhouette of a positive profile will be

interrupted by another. The human form resembles itself but also those strange barrel like creatures

described by Plato’s Aristophanes before the origin of love:

The form of every person was completely round, with back and sides making a circle …
and two faces exactly alike set on a round neck. There was one head for the two faces

4
 (which looked in opposite ways), four ears, two sets of genitals and everything else you
might guess from these particulars.7

Freud also mentions the myth in passing in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (where it does

remarkably little work).8 As in Aristophanes’s story, the bodies of Pantheon, for all their recombination

have the sort of formal predictability of a permutation table. This is because, whether described in the

positive or the negative, the silhouette of Payce’s vessels draw only three kinds of lines: backsides, a

flat chested front with an erection, and a front with breasts.

According to Helen Delacretaz, “The men and women of Pantheon unite in a flirtatious dance, a

rhythm that plays out as the viewer moves around the periphery, exploring it from multiple

perspectives.” And, because of the way it has so often been arranged and rearranged, what “could be

understood as a static arrangement of vessels becomes an animated tableau of human sexuality with a

frenetic sense of pace and motion.”9 Nevertheless, there is a striking asymmetry between the

expressiveness of these bodies. The circular symmetry of the thrown vessels that draw Pantheon’s

bodies exclusively in profile seems to be able to generate only one sign of desire: the erect penis.

Almost by accident, Payce’s ‘tableau of human sexuality’ becomes an (rather crude) allegory of Freud’s

claim that “libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature”.10 In Payce, this is the result of

the formal limits imposed by the way he draws the figure in space. If you like, it results from the terms

of his composition. Such terms turn out to shape what can be formulated in a way that is very difficult

7 Plato, Symposium, edited by: M.C. Howatson and Frisbee C.C. Sheffield, translated by: M.C. Howatson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 22-23.
8 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (USA: Basic Books, 1962), 2and 2n1.
Strictly speaking, it is Strachey who suggests that the creation myth to which Freud refers was the one told my
Aristophanes, it is not actually clear from Freud’s extremely abbreviated summary. Freud suggested that the common
sense view of the sexual instinct was reflected in this myth that sees love as the process by which the two torn halves of
humanity attempt to make themselves whole again. Freud thinks that anyone adopting such a view of sex must be
surprised by same sex attraction – but Aristophanes’ story explains precisely why a woman’s other half may be another
woman or a man, and why the same is true for men. According to Aristophanes there were three sexes: one composed of
two men, another of two women, and a third of a man and a woman. It appears that common sense only remembers the
last of these three.
9 Helen Delacretaz, “Greg Payce: Exploring the Void,” in 30 Objects, 30 Insights, ed. Rachel Gotlieb, (London: Blackdog
Publishing, 2014), p. 178-179
10 Freud, Three Essays, 85.

5
to resist. Freud’s ability to formulate a theory is similarly pressured by his terms – a fact of which he is

often aware, but from which he never quite finds a way out.

III

Whatever other criticisms might be leveled against Freud, he was an admirably honest and

candid writer. Even at his most self-deceptive, he consistently endeavored to be as upfront as he was

able to be about the sorts of analytical and rhetorical operations he was carrying out.11 He therefore did

not shrink from admitting that psycho-analysis had to carry on its business in spite of a key gap in its

ability to represent its objects of inquiry to itself. That is to say, by his own admission, Freud did not

know what sex was. Freud suggested that sex really had three senses: a psychological, a

biological/anatomical, and a sociological12 – but it escaped identification at every level.

The biological sense seems like the most straightforward: “‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are

characterized by the presence of spermatozoa or ova respectively and by the functions proceeding from

them.”13 It is already clear that this is an inadequate measure: there are many bodies that for various

reasons do not contain any gametes whatsoever. Worse, sex does seem to imply something other than

the mere presence of certain kinds of cells, but once you get past this already inadequate minimum

things only get messier. According to the best science of Freud’s time, the human body was

constitutively bisexual – each one containing vestigial versions of the sexual apparatus of the ‘opposite’

sex so that it is “as though an individual is not a man or a woman but always both - merely a certain

11 It is not a discredit to this honesty to suggest that it was in fact a result of one of his central (and ideological) self-
deceptions: that he was engaged in a scientific endeavor. Probably, more philosophers ought to approach their tasks in
the spirit of scientists.
12 Ibid., 85-86n1.
13 Ibid.

6
amount more the one than the other.” The result is that “what constitutes masculinity or femininity is an

unknown characteristic which anatomy cannot lay hold of.”14

The sociological sense, as Freud points out, “receives its connotation from the observation of

actually existing masculine and feminine individuals.”15

The inadequacy of the sociological sense puts it almost beneath Freud’s criticism: after all,

sociology, as far as Freud is concerned, is only applied psychology. And, unfortunately, psychology is

quite at sea. It is in this connection that Freud makes a truly incredible admission: “psycho-analysis

cannot elucidate the intrinsic nature of what in conventional or in biological phraseology is termed

‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’: it simply takes over the two concepts and makes them the foundation of its

work. When we attempt to reduce them further, we find masculinity vanishing into activity and

femininity into passivity”16 Worse, this reduction is more or less arbitrary: “we far too readily identify

activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness, a view which is by no means universally

confirmed in the animal kingdom”.17 And, as he says more explicitly in the “New Introductory

Lectures”:

we speak of a person, whether male or female, as behaving in a masculine way in one

connection and in a feminine way in another. But you will soon perceive that this is only
giving way to anatomy or to convention. You cannot give the concepts of ‘masculine’ and
‘feminine’ any new connotation. The distinction is not a psychological one; when you say
‘masculine’, you usually mean ‘active’, and when you say ‘feminine’, you usually mean
‘passive’. … But by this you have precisely reduced the characteristic of masculinity to the
factor of aggressiveness so far as psychology is concerned. Even in the sphere of human
sexual life you soon see how inadequate it is to make masculine behaviour coincide with
activity and feminine with passivity. A mother is active in every sense towards her child;
the act of lactation itself may equally be described as the mother suckling the baby or as her
14 Freud, “New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund
Freud, Vol XXII (1932-1936), trans. and ed. James Strachey, in Collaboration with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan
Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 113-114.
15 Freud, Three Essays, 85n1.
16 Freud, “The psychogenesis of a case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of
Sigmund Freud, Vol XVIII (1920-1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works, trans. and
ed. James Strachey, in Collaboration with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1964),
171. My italics.
17 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2010), 87n5.

7
 being sucked by it. The further you go from the narrow sexual sphere the more obvious will
the ‘error of superimposition’ become. Women can display great activity in various
directions, men are not able to live in company with their own kind unless they develop a
large amount of passive adaptability. If you now tell me that these facts go to prove
precisely that both men and women are bisexual in the psychological sense, I shall
conclude that you have decided in your own minds to make ‘active’ coincide with
‘masculine’ and ‘passive’ with ‘feminine’. But I advise you against it. It seems to me to
serve no useful purpose and adds nothing to our knowledge.18

At this point, Freud shifts the object of inquiry away from masculinity and femininity and onto

manhood and womanhood. In this regard, he insists that “psycho-analysis does not try to describe what

a woman is - that would be a task it could scarcely perform”. It instead sets itself a much more

interesting goal, that of “enquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child

with a bisexual disposition”.19

I want to make two claims about this maneuver in relation to the destabilizating operation

summarized above: (1) Freud fails to take it seriously enough – he misses entirely just how potentially

radical the proposal is and so does not carry out the task with any thing approaching consistency; and

(2) Freud does not bother to suggest that the same operation must be carried out for men, even though

that is in effect what he does by differentiating between the ways in which men and women navigate

through the crucible of the Oedipus complex. Nevertheless, the fact that the need to carry out both

operations goes unmarked has a serious consequence. It means that manhood can continue to be the

point of reference, that which can appear without first being explained. The result is that, in the very

same lecture, Freud is back to all the old habits that his preamble should have helped him to kick.

The fable is by now too familiar to warrant a full critical summary of the different paths taken

through the Oedipus complex here – and in any case, space does not allow for it. I will restrict myself

to some key points. From the beginning, the story of the emergence of the woman from the child with a

vagina is told as the story of the re-organization of her erotic life around a vagina open to penetration

18 Freud, “New Introductory Lectures,” 114-115. The passage was too good not to quote at length.
19 Ibid., 116.

8
(the “truly feminine vagina”).20 In other words, in spite of all of Freud’s warnings, womanhood is

defined around the anatomical division of labor in the reproductive act. As if the point were not clear

enough, Freud suggests that the question of how a woman emerges out of the bisexual child is in fact

co-terminus with the question “how does she pass from her masculine phase to the feminine one to

which she is biologically destined?”21 The answer to this question, it turns out, can quite easily pass

through their anatomy.

Until their introduction to castration towards the end of the Phallic phase, the sexuality of girls

and boys are almost identical. This does not mean that they are proto-gendered, rather “the little girl is

a little man.” She is so because she centers her masturbatory activity upon her clitoris, which is, after

all just a small penis.22 The little girl hence lives “in a masculine way”.23 Smuggled into this

formulation is the assumption that the little boy is also a little man, forgetting that the emergence of this

thing too is in need of an explanation. Hence, the inconsistent shift of the inquiry towards manhood and

womanhood here ends up masking what is retained from all the assumptions that Freud had so carefully

demolished. Anatomical masculinity (which we cannot properly explain or define) and a comportment

towards it is once again equated with masculinity (about which we are entirely in the dark) which, for

its part, just equals manhood (which, by rights, we ought not to be able to describe).

What turns one little man into a bigger man and another into a woman is their differing relations

to castration. This difference hinges upon their perception of their anatomical difference. That is, the

little girl (for reasons that Freud thinks are too self-evident to name) considers her clitoris to be nothing

but an inferior penis – which, coincidentally, is exactly what Freud thinks it is. She therefore

understands herself as already castrated24 and so develops penis envy. Under classical circumstances,

20 Ibid., 118.
21 Ibid., 119.
22 Ibid., 118.
23 Ibid., 126.
24 To be consistent, Freud ought to regard castration to be a matter of perception, although on at least on occasion he calls
the little girl’s castration a “fact” (cf “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,”

9
the girl will then react against her inferior penis by giving up clitoral masturbation entirely. This “clears

the phallic activity out of the way” meaning that “[p]assivity now has the upper hand,” hence, the

abandonment of the clitoris “smooths the way for femininity.”25 Hence Freud’s account of the

emergence of womanhood amounts precisely to the superimposition that he had warned against: vagina

– passivity – femininity – womanhood. There is therefore a crucial part missing to the end of Freud’s

preamble: “I know very well, but nevertheless...”

IV

The unabridged English translation of Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism: Elements of

a Homosexual Critique was published for the first time earlier this year. The book is a pioneering work

of queer Marxism that engages enthusiastically (gayly) with Freudian theory. It begins this engagement

by putting pressure on the vocabulary used by Freud, Wilhelm Fliess, Sándor Ferenczi, and their peers.

Mieli makes two important substitutions: he exchanges castration with educastration and

constitutive bisexuality with constitutive transsexuality. The effect of these substitutions is minimal,

and in many ways amount to an attempt to be more Freudian than Freud. The most obvious and

developed changes are (1) educastration makes the theater of the family a far more minor part of the

whole process, the true agent of which is neither the father nor the mother but society in general. (2)

Educastration does not even partially arise from children’s realizations about bodies (their own and

others’). According to Mieli, apart from this entirely social process, there “is nothing in life itself that

requires” educastration. Rather than having any (even partial) origins in the child’s anatomy,

educastration shapes children’s perceptions about bodies. And (3) the concept of educastration loosens

the strict stages of development that Freud develops – it does the bulk of its work in the early years, but

The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol XIX (1923-1925), trans. and ed. James Strachey, in
Collaboration with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 253).
25 Freud, “Introductory Essays,” p. 128.

10
is a more or less continuous process that (when mostly successful) takes this general shape:

autoeroticism—homosexuality—heterosexuality.26 It is more or less the exact sort of amendment you

would expect from a gay Marxist writing in 1977.

Although it is less developed, Mieli’s concept of constitutive transsexuality is potentially far

more interesting. Mieli wants to contain two things within this concept. The first is the idea of

“infantile ‘perverse’ polymorphism”27 (even this constitutes a slight shift in Freud’s vocabulary –

Freud’s preferred phrase is “polymorphously perverse”).28 For Mieli, this means that we are

constitutively predisposed to be able to find pleasures in any sexual aim or object. Hence

heterosexuality and homosexuality exist for the same reason: because any given person is originally

able to take a person of any sex as an object – it is only educastration that tends to whittle that down

into one sort of monosexuality or another. But constitutive transsexuality also contains what Mieli calls

the “original and deep hermaphrodism of every individual.”29 Educastration acts as a kind of unelected

corrective surgery upon the psyche, reshaping its hermaphrodism into one sex or another. Hence, Mieli

introduces the second aspect of transsexuality at first as little more than an edgier way of designating

bisexuality: the existence of supposedly feminine and masculine qualities within each of our bodies and

minds (even though neither Freud nor Mielli actually know what masculinity and femininity are) where

half of which (according to Fliess at any rate) had to be subject to repression.

Nevertheless the specific word choice introduces a new instability into the concept. A trans

person is today typically understood as someone who is some sex other than the one that they were

assigned at birth. In Mieli’s time it was understood as someone who either has or else desires to change

their sex. In her recently reissued history of trans liberation in the United States, Susan Stryker suggests

26 Mario Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism: Elements of a Homosexual Critique, trans. David Fernbach and Evan Calder
Williams (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 4-5.
27 Ibid. 4.
28 Freud, Three Essays, 57.
29 Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism, 6.

11
that the term ‘transgender’ should be characterized as a relation to sex and gender that seeks

“movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place.”30 What, in that

case, could it mean to say that every man and woman is a repressed transsexual, and, moreover that

transsexuality means to have both a man and a woman in your head? It seems to suggest a kind of

constant motion in which psychic femininity and masculinity are perpetually passing into each other.

Before educastration can amputate one half or the other, it must first halt that constant back and forth

transition. In a sense, this preliminary act of organizing and immobilizing that educastration must

perform can be understood as sexing what is, prior to that process, merely proto-sexual material

potentially capable of other configurations. In other words, that masculinity and femininity themselves

are categories given us by educastration, and that their contents are deeply dependent upon the

historically shifting work that educastration does upon us.

Did Mieli have any of these possible implications in mind when he developed the concept? In

the middle of his discussion of transsexuality and its relation to homosexuality, Mieli suddenly pauses

to critique his own language. The language he has adopted merely explains homosexuality in terms of

heterosexuality when it could potentially be used to understand

psycho-biological hermaphrodism not as something bi-sexual, but rather as something

erotic in a new (and also very old) sense, as polysexual, transsexual. … it is no good trying
to use the bisexual and therefore heterosexual categories of our alienated reason,
superimposed on the latent and the repressed, to plumb the depths, for we shall only fail to
appreciate the full scope of the repression that chains us to the status quo.31

It is, at least in my view, a powerful self-criticism, but it is not one systematically carried over

to the rest of the book’s theoretical work – ‘I know very well, but nevertheless...’ It is as if Mieli were

in such a hurry to speak that he could not pause to invent a new language. Instead, he frequently places

quotes around the words ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ as if to admit that they are not really good

enough but will have to do. I would suggest that this is a decent allegory for all our attempts to name
30 Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, second edition (New York: Seal Press, 2017), 1.
31 Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism, 19-20. Original italics.

12
and also to craft sex: in order to get on with it, we use that which is already given with greater or lesser

awareness of its inadequacy but these are the only approximations we have available. Perhaps it is not

always the case that we must strive to represent our sexes (to ourselves and to others) as intelligible –

but it nevertheless seems to be the case that we most frequently do.

There is an affinity between the critiques Mieli makes of himself and the critique Gilles Deleuze

makes of Freud. But Deleuze – with whom Mieli would have had some familiarity – launches his

critique by means of a drastic shift both of the vocabulary and of the object of his analysis.

Hence, for Deleuze the psyche and the body did not possess any kind of original bisexuality.

Deleuze speaks rather of an artificially produced “enemy within: i.e. the phallus of the difference of the

sexes … a bisexuality that is divided distributed, and set in opposition, one side against the other.” In

words that both echo and reshape Mieli’s, Deleuze writes of an original “multiplicity which finds itself

reduced, crushed by the distribution of the sexes and one’s assignment as either one or the other” by a “

whole social mechanism destined to reduce [people, and especially women] to the demands of marriage

and reproduction.” Thus for Deleuze the key difference is not firstly between men and women “but

between the state of n-sexes on the one hand and, on the other, its reduction to one or the other of the

two.”32

This should not be understood as true only at the level of the pscyche. The West has organized

its understanding of sex in a variety of ways, but its ability to actually control bodily difference to suite

these changing understandings is a matter of historical contingency. As Anne Fausto-Sterling points

out, systematic medical intervention upon intersexed bodies at birth only began in Europe in the 1930s.
32 Gilles Deleuze, “Alain Roger's Le Misogyne” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David
Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Toarmina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 76-78.

13
Given that about one in every two thousand children are born with some form of intersexuality, their

bodies were a reality with which society at large had to reckon. Prior to the development and

implementation of systematic medical intervention at birth, there were many periods in which the West

had accepted and tolerated a greater variety in the anatomical sex of the body than that which we treat

as common sense today.33

Nevertheless, it is clear that Deleuze thinks of n sexes as a possibility of all bodies and all

persons regardless of their anatomy at birth. For Deleuze, n sexes is about the configuration of

assemblages – desiring connections with other bodies and objects. This is a sexuality in fatal contrast to

the one that has been strapped to ‘marriage and reproduction.’ The latter is the sex of a body reduced to

a tool-body capable only of the sort of connections implied by the configurations of reproductivity. The

former is the lush sexuality of a body capable of every kind of connection, remaking and re-purposing

its sex for every new assemblage with bodies and objects that can do the same. This theft then is

something more than the constriction of our psyche’s implied by Mieli’s educastration – it is a real

process of limitation whereby the very possibilities of assemblage are systematically restricted.

Which is not to say that it has no psychical component. And it is here that Deleuze’s critique of

psychoanalysis is at its most trenchant. Deleuze suspects that if the fable of castration captures anything

at all, it does so quite literally. By its very existence, it captures our ability to configure our sexes,

trapping it within the tracks of Mommy-Daddy. But the first issue is not to explain or describe

castration, but rather the theft of the child’s countless sexes.34 This theft is a question of power, and

psychoanalysis, it turns out, is on the side of the enemy: “As soon as desire assembles something, in

relation to an Outside, to a Becoming, they undo this assemblage, they [psychoanalysts] break it up,

showing how the assemblage refers on the one hand to a partial infantile mechanism and, on the other,
33 Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books,
2000), 30-44.
34 Gilles Deleuze, “The Interpretation of Utterances,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed.
David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Toarmina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 94.

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to a global Oedipal structure. … They are always trying to break up the machinic assemblages of

desire.”35

In other words, the specific configuration of the sexes into two stable forms is part of a system

(for Deleuze as well as for Mieli, this is capitalism) that attempts to take control of the powers and

desires of its subjects and their bodies in order to strap these to the reproductive (biological as well as

social) needs of capital. To shift codes, the gender order is part of a biopolitical strategy enacted upon

each individual for the maintenance of the population (hence Deleuze’s emphasis on marriage and

reproduction, although a more complete picture would also have to include the way in which certain

people are debarred from reproduction).

I am, at least for the purposes of this essay, uninterested in the correctness of these explanations

of the motive source of the division of the sexes. What is important is the historicization and

politicization of the categories themselves. The fact that their very existence and not just their contents

are treated as in need of explanation. Neither bodies nor psyches explain their own sex, rather they are

what get configured into one sex or another. The approach begun by Deleuze at least allows us to ask

why? Why are they configured into sexes in the first place, and why these ones?

VI

Although I insist upon their correctness, I don’t intend to answer these questions. Instead I want

to return to the unfathomability of sex. It is clear enough that if Deleuze is right about n sexes, then our

real sexes reconfigured for every assemblage must necessarily be ad hoc affairs – more multifarious

than two, perhaps, but just as ad hoc as Mieli’s deployment of their names in Toward a Gay

Communism. Sex actually becomes a temporary good-enough configuration and our knowledge about
35 Gilles Deleuze, “Four Propositions on Psychoanalysis,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995,
ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Toarmina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 82.

15
it too need only (and arguably can only) be good enough for the occasion. For Deleuze, we really do

continue to have n sexes, because the social mechanism is not able to simply slot us into one

assemblage. Male and female, or if you prefer, man and woman, therefore systematically misname our

n sexes – but the reality of the theft perpetrated against us is such that the sexes we are able to

configure are frequently close enough to those named by ‘male’ and ‘female.’ In other words, male and

female are names for a systematic inexactness. Which is why they will sometimes be felt as being not

only inadequate, but simply wrong.

This is not a call to abandon the categories – we experience our sex psychologically, at the level

both of our conscious and our unconscious, and it is subject to purposeful manipulation only to the

most limited degree. Nor is it a suggestion that all claims to sexual identity should be treated as simply

false, or worse, in cahoots with the gender order. To the extent that the gender order possesses

biopolitical effectiveness, it is in its ability to make these externally generated categories felt as internal

truths. Opposition to that system cannot be based on hectoring others to reject it, but in creating as

much space as possible for each one of us to negotiate it autonomously. All good faith claims to sexual

identity are therefore true, both those that seem to conform to expectations and those that do not. “The

schizoanalytic slogan of the desiring-revolution will be first of all: to each its own sexes.”36

36 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schitzophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and
Helen R. Lane, 296.

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