SHEILA L.

CAVANAGH

TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT

TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT: A Lacanian Approach

Sheila L. Cavanagh

The author uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to conceptualize trans-

gender embodiment, focusing on the Lacanian concept “objet a” to
analyze how transpeople may be uniquely attuned to a fundamental
lack in being endemic to all subjects of language. Objet a is central
to the Imaginary register where body images and sex morphology
intermingle. The author discusses objet a in relation to the mirror
(and the Other’s cisgender gaze), anxiety, postsurgical scars, lin-
guistics, and Thing-like feelings of monstrosity (born of transpho-
bia). For those who are transgender, the a may register as an embod-
ied disjunction between gender identity and natal sex assignment.

The object that provokes anxiety in the neurotic is the a-Thing,

that is, the desire of the Other, as the Other requires that the
subject erase its borders, handing itself over to it in an uncondi-
tional manner.
—Jacques Lacan, The seminar
of Jacques Lacan: Book X. Anxiety

Those who undergo a transsexual (trans*) transition are some-

times at a loss to concretize the Thing at stake in the change.1
Transitions are, people say, a question of identity, gender identity,
and its confirmation. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, identity
(trans* and otherwise) is a fragile defense against the body’s in-
herent disunity. While staking a claim to identity can be empower-
ing, it can also obscure the way embodiment is, as Jacques Lacan
(2002) contends, necessarily fragmented. We invest in identities to
camouflage the fact that we are constituted in and by a cleavage, a
fundamental gap enacted during the mirror stage. The Lacanian
body is based upon a constitutive alienation during the mirror
stage. By adopting identities—gendered and otherwise marked—
we attempt to suture alienating cuts born in and before the mir-
ror. But the identificatory seams do not hold. Identity is a poor de-
fense against the body’s inherent disunity. Identities, as ego-based

Psychoanalytic Review, 105(3), June 2018 © 2018 N.P.A.P.

304 SHEILA L. CAVANAGH

defenses, order and regulate the drives. They attempt to protect

the subject from anxiety, but they inevitably fail. The point is not
to abandon gendered identities but, rather, to consider how we all
negotiate a primordial loss in and before the mirror. Lacan invites
us to consider how we are paradoxically inscribed by what cannot
be seen or said; there is a fundamental lack at the heart of being
that concerns embodiment. The body cannot be circumscribed
by words or images alone. The difficulty with the body is that it
is circumscribed by a primordial lack in being, a lack that cannot
be encapsulated by discourse and is, also, in excess of the image
given to be seen. Embodiment is a contentious scene because, as
I explain in this paper, it is always fragmented and dependent on
the gaze of the Other, who plays a pivotal role during the mirror
stage.
Through my Lacanian inquiry, I suggest that trans* subjectiv-
ity may involve an acute sensitivity to the way we are all, regard-
less of gender, inscribed by a void inaugurated during the mir-
ror stage. It follows that trans-positive representational practices
are not only about the visible but about dimensions of being that
go unseen. Questions about the body and its image are not only
central to trans* studies but to body and feminist studies more
generally. Too often fragmentation is viewed as a harm done to
the body, and ideas about bodily cohesion, integration, and iden-
tity-based coherence are viewed as desirable and normal. While
we may strive to decrease feelings of fragmentation because they
are accompanied by anxiety, there will always be some degree of
bodily fragmentation, alienation, and lack regardless of gender,
sexuality, and trans* status. Of course, the way we negotiate a
constitutive gap in the mirror differs for everyone. My objective
is to mine those segments of Lacanian theory relevant to trans*
theories of embodiment.
I use the Lacanian concept objet a to consider how embodiment
is always fragmented and governed by a fundamental lack in be-
ing. My objective in putting Lacan’s writings on objet a in dialogue
with trans* studies is not to negate the realities of transphobia or,
alternatively, to relativize trans* experience by suggesting it is the
same as the experiences of embodiment of those who are cisgen-
der (non-trans). Nor do I wish to invalidate the painful realities
of body dysphoria that some transpeople experience. My inten-
tion is rather to consider what Lacanian psychoanalysis may of-
TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT 305

fer to our understanding of trans* subjectivity, embodiment, and

desire. By considering the psychical dimensions of subjectivity,
trans* and otherwise, my hope is to better understand how best
to relieve anxieties associated with gender, the body, and iden-
tity. Lacan’s formulation of being is admittedly dense. It demands
careful study but is helpful to excavate elements of human exis-
tence that are non-specular, yet psychically significant.
In what follows, I consider objet a in relation to four topical
themes central to trans* studies of embodiment: the mirror (and
the Other’s cisgender gaze); anxiety (dysphoria); the linguistics of
postsurgical scars (central to trans* genre); and Thing-like feelings
of monstrosity (born of transphobia). These topical themes are
not inclusive of the multiple and varied ways transpeople narra-
tive and theorize embodiment. I have chosen them because they
touch upon elements of being that can be understood through
the Lacanian formulation of objet a. What unites them is that they
all touch upon something invisible in the visible relevant to em-
bodiment. Objet a quite literally does not have a specular image.
The concept is usually translated into English as the “object cause
of desire.” Objet a is what remains after the mirror stage. As ex-
plained earlier, the mirror stage enables the subject to differenti-
ate him- or herself from a parental Other, but at the expense of
a constitutive eclipse. The a is the non-specularized remainder
eclipsed by the subject’s immersion in the locus of the Other.
There is, in other words, a transitive component to the mirror
stage. Lacanian psychoanalysis prompts us to consider how our
self imagery is enabled by an alienating identification with the
gaze of the Other during the mirror stage. When a primary care-
giver says to the infant/toddler, “That is you in the mirror,” and
the infant/toddler identifies with the image, the mirror stage can
be said to have been completed. The moment of recognition for
the six- to eighteen-month-old is jubilant because there is a feeling
of gestalt. But it is also alienating because the infant/toddler is
intercepted by the gaze of an Other. We intercept ourselves from
a point external to the body proper, outside the corporeal coor-
dinates of a given spatial nexus where we expect to find the body.
This experience of dislocation can be understood in relation to
the Lacanian concept objet a.
Objet a is born of a lack instituted in the field of the Other. It
is a leftover from the subject–Other relation that cannot be tran-
306 SHEILA L. CAVANAGH

scribed. It is what remains of the subject’s formation in the field

of the Other. The mirror of the Other is central to subject consti-
tution, but also produces some degree of estrangement. The jubi-
lant experience had by toddlers who recognize themselves in the
mirror is not about image-based completion; one’s body cannot
be fully circumscribed by the mirror. The jubilation is a reckoning
based on an error, a presumption that we can be made transpar-
ent to ourselves. The body-image is a function of the Imaginary
that does not square with what often counts as the medico-an-
atomical body. Bodily coherence, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, is
transitory at best. Something relevant to the subject’s being is lost.

TRANSGENDER STUDIES

The mirror, the body, and the politics of representation figure

prominently in trans* studies. Trans* studies scholars are devel-
oping sophisticated articulations of being, subjectivity, and exis-
tence, but thus far without significant attention to psychoanaly-
sis. Although this is changing (Cavanagh, 2017), my suggestion is
that Lacanian psychoanalysis offers valuable conceptual tools to
understand feelings of subjective lack that are relevant to trans*
studies. In psychoanalytic terms, feelings of lack can involve sex
morphology, desire, and bodily imagery, phenomena that Lacan
associates with the Imaginary register. “The imaginary is consti-
tuted of representations of affect and of the real; it is a chaotic/
turbulent yet structured flow of feelings, knowledges, sensations—
it is the site of the turbulence or discordance of the I” (Venn,
2004, p. 152). While trans* studies is motivated by a wish to value
and to authenticate trans* lives, bodies, desires, and experiences
there is something more at stake. Trans* poetry, prose, music, art,
film, and so forth often evoke and play with the mirror because
there is, as trans* subjects know all too well, something central
to being that goes unseen. In other words, trans* studies may be
guided by a desire to apprehend something beyond the visible,
yet central to being, in Lacanian terms.
One of the major accomplishments of trans* scholarly inquiry
is the animation of a structural impasse between what is seen
and unseen functioning at the level of the body. What goes un-
seen is often attributed to a negated and marginalized gender
TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT 307

identity. This negation and marginalization cannot be denied.

The repudiation and disavowal of trans identifications is amply
documented in the transpeople scholarly literature (Irving & Raj,
2014; Namaste, 2000; Spade, 2008). It also chronicles the deeply
disturbing ways transpeople—particularly transpeople of color or
low socioeconomic status, or those who are sex workers, undocu-
mented, incarcerated, subject to deportation, and so forth—are
subject to systemic prejudice and discrimination, sexual violence,
and aligned with premature death and the necropolitical (Cot-
ten, 2012; Haritaworn, Kuntsman, & Posocco, 2014). To the ex-
tent that this violence goes unseen, or is of no consequence to
cisgender-majoritarian populations, there is a devastating lack of
recognition and authentication. This nullification is transphobic
but also, in Lacanian terms, indicative of a structural problem of
recognition and being in the Symbolic (the psychic register re-
sponsive to signs, symbols, language, and discourse). What trans*
communities engage in their academic, cultural, artistic, and po-
litical works is—interpreted through the lens of Lacanian psycho-
analysis—the invisible in the visible.
When trans* and gender-variant people speak, for example,
of gender/body dysphoria (and not all of them do), they are in-
dexing an all too human disturbance functioning at the level of
the Imaginary—the register central to body image, affect, and sex
embodiment. Writing specifically about trans-sexing (as an act of
healing), Hayward (2013) notes that trans* subjectivities “ripple
and rupture the field of representation” (p. 186). To put the vi-
sual lapse in another way, trans* subjects know that the other’s
(cisgender) gaze apprehends them from a place in which they
cannot be seen. This absent-presence concerns the ego and the
Imaginary. Identification with the specular image is a stage in-
volving what Lacan calls the Imaginary relation. He explains that
what remains after the mirror stage is a remainder. This “remain-
der” is unsignified and thus Real (beyond the word-image). As
Evans (1996) explains, the Lacanian Real “also has connotations
of matter, implying a material substrate underlying the imaginary
and the symbolic” (p. 160). For Lacan, the mirror of the Other is
central to subject constitution. But there is, for everyone, a Real
problem having to do with what cannot be visually intercepted
by the Other. There is, in other words, something central to the
308 SHEILA L. CAVANAGH

subject’s being that does not appear. As Lacan explains, the Real
is intercepted as a void; it is structured like a pot with a rim.
The image, radiating from the orbit of the Other (as mirror),
forms the basis of the Lacanian body imago. Freud (1923) famous-
ly wrote that “the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not
merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” (p.
26). In other words, the bodily ego involves a psychic investment
in the body image. Lacan essentially revises the Freudian concep-
tion of the bodily ego through his writings on the mirror stage.
It is in relation to the imago and identification that Lacan (2002)
locates a myriad of bodily symptoms including, but not limited
to, the “amputee’s illusion to the hallucination of one’s double,
including the latter’s appearance in dreams and the delusional
objectifications that go with it” (p. 151).
Lacan offers the example of what is commonly called the “miss-
ing limb” syndrome, which Prosser (1998) also theorizes in re-
lation to transsexual skins. Lacan was intending to explain that
so far as the body is concerned, there is something “omitted in
cognition’s consideration” (Lacan, 2014, p. 217). He was also il-
lustrating how what is missing or, alternatively, phantasmatically
present, is shaped by desire and the Imaginary. Unlike Prosser,
who understands the Freudian bodily ego as ultimately material,
Lacan insists that we understand the body in terms of the signi-
fier and the Other. This contention is compatible with Salamon’s
(2010) thesis in Assuming a Body: Transgender and the Rhetorics of
Materiality, wherein she posits a body that can signify in ways that
depart from its mirror image. There is for Salamon, like Lacan,
a productive gap, tension, or fissure between psyche and soma
played out in and before the mirror. “That is, the body that one
feels oneself to have is not necessarily the same body that is de-
limited by its exterior contours, and this is the case even for any
normatively gendered subject” (Salamon, 2010, p. 14).

THE MIRROR

Lacan’s formulation of objet a allows us to understand how the

phantasmatic body departs from its mirror-image and this is
crucially important to understanding trans* and gender-variant
embodiment. The “a belongs to the realm of the image” (Lacan,
TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT 309

2014, p. 162) and is embodied even though it cannot be seen.

It has to do with a lack in being. In a place of lack something
can appear, and its presence is none other than “a, the object
in the function that it fulfils in the fantasy” (Lacan, 2014, p. 45).
The a is, in other words, central to the Imaginary, where body-
image, gender, and sex morphology comingle. My contention is
that for those who are trans*, the a may be registered as a schism
or impasse between gender identity, which cannot be seen, and
sex assignment at birth, which is symbolically ratified at a critical
distance from the subject’s desire.
In “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire”
Lacan (2002) explains that the a is a partial object and that it has
“no specular image, in other words, no alterity” (p. 693). In other
words, the mirror cannot reflect the a. “It is this object that cannot
be grasped in the mirror that the specular image lends its clothes”
(p. 693). We may speculate that the unseen a is what trans* sub-
jects inscribe and negotiate by transitioning. Lacan likens objet a
to a “substance caught in the net of a shadow, and which, robbed
of its shadow-swelling volume, holds out once again the tired lure
of the shadow as if it were substance” (p. 693). To put this in dif-
ferent terms, the object cause of desire is a Real feature of the
subject with bulk that cannot be reflected. The Real is beyond
the word (signifier) and the image (picture). Unlike reality (with a
lowercase “r”), the Lacanian Real is beyond signification. The two
orders having to do with the Real and reality are a sticking point
for the subject.
One way to understand this sticking point is to remember that
body parts lacking spectral support can register for the subject as
a component of sex embodiment. Lacan notes, for instance, that
the phallus can appear in the “field of the oneiric apparition. . . .
Right where apparently there is no real phallus, its ordinary pat-
tern of apparition is to appear in the form of two phalli” (Lacan,
2014, p. 99). The “two phalli” involve the a and what is inter-
cepted by the Other’s gaze. For transmen this can be the differ-
ence between the phantasmatic penis one has and the Real vagina
one does not have. Just as Butler (1993) wrote about the lesbian
phallus and the morphological imagination, there is in Lacanian
psychoanalysis an imaginary phallus that has nothing to do with
the penis. There is, in other words, no essential link between the
phantasmatic body and the body demarcated by biomedical sci-
310 SHEILA L. CAVANAGH

ence. Lacan is interested in how the phallus appears and disap-

pears, the “ambiguity with respect to this presence” (Lacan, 2014,
p. 259). What concerns Lacan is what has been erased in the mak-
ing of the subject during the mirror stage. This concern is not
unlike trans* scholarly interest in the way elements of the subject
associated with gender identity are erased, negated, and rendered
invisible.
While not speaking about transsexuality but instead of de-
personalization, Lacan writes: “Phenomenologically speaking, it
seems to go without saying that depersonalization begins with
the non-recognition of the specular image” (Lacan, 2014, p. 120).
The Lacanian subject requires specular support. Lacan goes so
far as to say that the function of the body is to be appended. He
is referring here to the way the body must be localized in space.
“The body is anything and nothing—it’s a point” (Lacan, 2014, p.
252). It must thus be routed in space like an axis. The subject must
exist in the field of the Other and this existence is specular. For
neurotics (a statistically common psychic structure where there is
what Lacan calls an operative paternal function), an element of
fantasy appears as body image. When the image is not recognized
by the Other there is another kind of alienation. Lacan (2014)
writes: The “surest way of approaching this lost something is to
conceive of it as a bodily fragment” (p. 134). These imaginary
bodily fragments are libidinized. For those who are trans* there
are, very often, primary and secondary sex characteristics that
must be apprehended by others but, unfortunately, are not reli-
ably validated in visual-symbolic circuits. One way to deal with
what cannot be made manifest is to use what Lacan calls a rit-
ual object. Although he is referring to the shofar, a horn blown
for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Lacan’s (2014) discussion
is about the use of an object to uphold the phallic function (p.
245). The phallic function involves the Imaginary, where the body
image is coordinated with the Symbolic and the Real. Prosthetic
parts can function like Lacan’s ritual objects. They can be used
to triangulate and to animate a difference between the a and the
body delimited by the Other’s gaze. A prosthetic penis (dildo)
can reduce feelings of alienation central to, for example, gender/
body dysphoria. Dysphoria can, in Lacanian terms, be defined as
a difference between one’s felt gender identity (Imaginary) and
the way the subject’s body image is intercepted by the gaze of the
TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT 311

Other. The difference between gender identity and the way one’s
body is intercepted by the gaze of the Other is Real and, thus,
jouissant.
Although Lacan (2014) illustrates the pathologies of the ego in
terms of depersonalization and the fragmented-body fantasy (p.
119), his work on objet a is useful for understanding a variety of
neurotic relations to the body and its specular image relevant to
trans* subjectivity. He tells us that the “imaginary fracture pres-
ents all sorts of variations and possible anomalies” (p. 46). Lacan
repeatedly says that there is no lack in the Real. Though Lacan
does posit that it is unfeasible to make a “man with a limp . . .
one legged” (p. 379), he does not comment on how best to treat
one who desires to change sex. There is, unfortunately, a lack of
specificity with respect to what he calls transsexualist jouissance
(a painful bodily pleasure we may read in terms of gender/body
dysphoria) and the myriad of other bodily effects the Other’s de-
sire can engender. The lack of specificity has produced a range of
interpretations, uses, and applications of Lacanian psychoanalysis
to trans* subjectivity—some of which border on transphobic (Chi-
land, 2009; Glocer Fiorini & Gimenez de Vainer, 2003; Millot,
1990; Morel, 2011), while others are more transpositive in their
clinical applications (Carlson, 2010; Elliot, 2001; Gherovici, 2010;
Gozlan, 2015).
It is, however, clear that for Lacan we all relate to what does not
appear in the specular image. A bodily investment is made in the
a (as absent-presence). The anxiety Lacan (2014) refers to in his
discussion of the mirror is about the “infinite recursion of inter-
reflected images [that are] produced” (p. 224). The body does not
cohere, and this is true for everyone, regardless of trans* status.
The fundamental alienation, which concerns the Imaginary, leads
us to install illusions of “wholeness, synthesis, autonomy, duality
and, above all, similarity” (Evans, 1996, p. 82). But the cohesion is
offset by a constitutive disunity. “As divided subjects, we oscillate
between the pleasure of experiencing the consistency of the self
and the pleasure of having that consistency shattered” (Cameron,
2013, p. 194).
Lacan cautions us against any attempt to amalgamate these im-
ages. This is not an argument against transitioning. It is, rather,
a fact having to do with the body, caught as it is between the
way it is intercepted and the subject’s investment in what goes
312 SHEILA L. CAVANAGH

unseen. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the body is a Real impasse.

There is a “primordial dehiscence, or gaping of the human sub-
ject” (Venn, 2004, p. 152). This lack in being bothers, but also
constitutes, the subject. For Lacan, there is an unavoidable gap
between actual corporeality and the mental representation of it
in the subject’s bodily imago. Bodily integration is not possible in
Lacanian terms—at least not completely. The psychoanalytic ob-
jective is to live creatively with the impasse, the cut engendered
by the signifier. The Lacanian signifier is a unit of language that is
not bound to a given signified (meaning). A signifier is a combina-
tory and unstable linguistic element bound by metonymy. For our
purposes, suffice to say that for Lacan no signifier can signify the
subject. It does, however, have effects on the body. From a Laca-
nian perspective, there is always something about the signifier
and its effects on the body that go unseen—regardless of trans*
status. “All the things of the world come to be staged in keeping
with the laws of the signifier, laws that we could never fancy in
any way to be consistent with the laws of the world at the outset”
(Lacan, 2014, p. 33)
Lacan’s worry is ultimately about the impact that image-based
amalgamation, as a form of normalization, can have on the play
of desire. He writes that any attempt at the reintegration of bodi-
ly images “can only lead the subject to an increased alienation
from his desire, that is, to some form of inversion, insofar as his
sex is in question” (Lacan, 2002, p. 379). While it is not entirely
clear if he is referring to transsexualist jouissance or to homosex-
ual jouissance, it is clear that his worry lies with what he calls the
“stalemate of desire” (Lacan, 2002, p. 379). It follows that what
may cause anxiety for some is the societal (cisgender) pressure to
synthesize gender identity and sex embodiment. In other words,
bi-gender cultures that are predicated upon rigid and exacting
dualisms between male–masculinity and female–femininity pro-
mote, and very often enforce, image-based amalgamation at the
level of gender identity and sex embodiment. The Lacanian objec-
tive would be to enable gender identity and sexual morphology to
exist in transposition and play. Again, this is not to cast aspersion
on gender-confirming surgeries, or any other kind of transition. It
is, rather, a commentary on the way bi-gender systems positing an
essential correlate between gender identity and sexual morphol-
ogy can thwart the play of desire. We must all find original ways to
TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT 313

deal with the socio-symbolic restrictions placed upon desire and

its vicissitudes.
Objet a is a cause of desire; it animates and enchants us as it
also bothers and causes us anxiety. Objet a is a function enabling
desire, not an object itself. It is a nonvisual link to the lost Other
in the mirror. The a is not a lost object but, rather, a non-object. It
is a surplus, a remainder wrought by the cut of the signifier (and
not a body part).2 To put this formulation in other terms, objet
a is the non-site of anxiety that takes residency in the body. For
Lacan, objet a involves a “fault, hole, or loss therein . . . [it] comes
to function with respect to that loss” (Lacan, 1998, p. 28). It is an
immaterial trace. As such, it is quintessentially Real.

LACANIAN ANXIETY AND GENDER DYSPHORIA

Trans* studies deals with questions relating to desire and affect.

There is, for example, a uniquely important focus on the anxiety
caused by transphobic violence, gender misreadings (including
refusals on the part of others to use correct gender pronouns),
dead-naming (whereby a given name as opposed to a chosen
name is used to address the subject), and the correlate desire for
humane recognition and identity-based authentication. It is im-
portant to consider anxiety in relation to objet a because the gap
foundational to the subject inevitably causes not only desire, but
anxiety for everyone. Lacan writes that anxiety is the only affect
that does not lie. In fact, he writes that we apprehend the a only,
truly in anxiety. He defines anxiety as a lack of lack. That is, anxi-
ety occurs when something appears in the region of the virtual
image as objet a. When, for example, a lover or parent appears un-
barred (without lack), anxiety can emerge. In other words, there
can be a Real worry about the Other’s jouissance impinging upon
the subject’s being. The appearance of the Other becomes jouis-
sant when it encroaches upon the subject’s generative gap.
As the subject comes into being in a gap, lack provides the
subject with structural support. The subject’s very existence is at
stake in maintaining the gap; therefore, a lack of lack in the form
of an unmitigated presence of the Real (appearing at unbarred
Other) is terrifying. When transpeople speak about gender dys-
phoria (or, conversely, have the psychiatric diagnosis foisted upon
314 SHEILA L. CAVANAGH

them) they are, from a Lacanian perspective, describing acute

anxiety born of a lack of lack. We are all subjects of lack in Laca-
nian psychoanalysis. Lack enables desire. A lack of lack interferes
with the circulation of desire and threatens the subject’s “being”
in the Symbolic. Transitioning may be driven by a need to rein-
scribe a lack or, in other words, a regenerative gap between the
subject and the invasive jouissance of the Other.
The Other’s jouissance may be intercepted as a gender-misread-
ing or, more tellingly, as dead-naming. Either way, the subject feels
annihilated because the Other is felt to encroach on the subject’s
living-space. As Lacan insists, anxiety is framed and most defi-
nitely has an object. The a is the object that allows for the frame,
and this frame enables the play of desire. Lacan (2014) explains:
“The function of the frame, the window frame I mean, which I
tried to define in the structure of fantasy, is not a metaphor. If the
frame exists, it’s because space is real” (p. 283). In other words,
the subject’s living-space is, in Lacanian terms, Real and must be
understood to involve phantasy. Anxiety occurs when something
appears in the space of the frame—too close to the a. The “some-
thing” appearing in the space of the a threatens the subject. An-
other way to formulate the same idea is to say that the Other’s de-
sire encroaches upon the subject’s existence and does so precisely
where desire circulates. Let us remember that Lacan (2014) asso-
ciates the traumatic Thing with the desire of the Other. “Anxiety
is the appearance, within this framing, of what was already there,
at much closer quarters, at home, Heim” (p. 75). What was al-
ready there, at home, is the first Other who intercepts the toddler
during the mirror stage. We feel anxiety when something appears
in the space of the mirror-like frame that is too close for comfort.
Lacan is careful to specify that the encroachment is not caused
by an actual inhabitant of, for example, a house, but is instead a
never fully recognized unheimlich. The unknown visitor is “not so
much inhabitable as in-habiting, not so much in-habitual as in-ha-
bituated” (p. 76). The unheimlich inhabits the subject (and should
not be understood as an actual subject, like a mother or father in
the terms of object relations, for example). The anxiety emerg-
ing in the presence of the unheimlich is about the cut, the shape
of the unary trait (the primordial signifier). It does not deceive.
“Anxiety is the cut—this clean cut without which the presence of
TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT 315

the signifier, its functioning, its furrow in the real, is unthinkable”

(Lacan, 2014, p. 76).
Lacan never tires of saying that the subject’s desire is the Oth-
er’s desire. The trouble, or productive tension (depending on
how we see it), is that the Other can (and does) use the subject as
an objet petite a (object cause of desire). By this formulation Lacan
means that the subject is used as a cause of desire for the Oth-
er. He also recognizes that the Other’s desire can be unbarred
(without limit) insofar as the subject is concerned. Psychoanalysts
of early childhood object relations often observe that the child
is trying to figure out what the Other (as parent) wants. While
Lacan does not follow a Kleinian object-relations paradigm, he
does concur that the Other (as subject position, not actual par-
ent) can leave no room for the subject to desire.3 While Lacan
introduces the signifier into the object relations equation, both
object relations and Lacanian paradigms underscore the central
elements of the mirror and the gaze of the Other in their theories
of embodiment. There is, in other words, a lack of lack that acts
as an obstacle to desire. In such instances, the subject must do
whatever is necessary to overcome what feels like an eclipse, an
obliteration of desire and being.
If the Other’s desire envelops the subject to the point that a
foundational gap begins to close, it should not be surprising that
a metaphorical or literal (surgical) cut may be needed to puncture
the image overdetermined by the Other’s gaze. While a surgical
cut (or hormone injection) operates at the level of reality, it has
implications for the play of desire, phantasy, and, ultimately, the
Imaginary. To the extent that the three psychic registers (Sym-
bolic, Imaginary, and Real) are knotted, the medical intervention
will touch the Real. It is not the bodily change alone that brings
about a transition, but rather the subject’s use of the surgery, hor-
mone therapy, or any other linguistic or somatechnical (Sullivan
& Murray, 2009) intervention to overcome a stalemate of desire in
the domain of the Other.

THE SCAR, THE CUT, AND THE LACANIAN CROSS-CAP

There is much focus on postsurgical scars in trans* autobiogra-

phy and photography. The significance of the Lacanian cut for
316 SHEILA L. CAVANAGH

understanding the function of transsexual transitions cannot

be underestimated. Freud occasionally refers to the “scar” as a
remnant-like symptom left over from the oedipal complex. Lacan
revisits the original Freudian formulation to suggest that it is, ul-
timately, objet a that is at stake. Although referring to the func-
tion of circumcision in the Egyptian world, Lacan shows us how
the literal cut is about objet a. The cut that is a “separation from
a particular part of the body, a particular appendage, comes to
symbolize for the now alienated subject a fundamental relation-
ship with his body” (Lacan, 2014, p. 213). Postsurgical scar tissue
can function to inscribe a relation to the body that was, prior to
surgery, or indeed hormone therapy, characterized by extreme
alienation or, conversely, a lack of lack.
In his Lacanian approach to trans* subjectivity, Gozlan (2015)
notes that gender-confirming surgery becomes a way to rupture
the imaginary link to the Other at the same time as leaving a
mark (stitch) on the body that becomes a renewed way of linking
two spaces that are forever marked by a gap/scar, a sort of link
that is born of the impossibility of unity (pp. 53-54).
The scar delimits a void where the Other has been but no lon-
ger is, or rather, no longer appears to be. It functions as a limit
but also as a corporeal edge and is, as such, a source of anxiety.
Like objet a, the scar must not signify; it should hover or circle
around an absence without landing. A scar is essentially a lack
of inscription that paradoxically inscribes a void. Gozlan (2015)
writes of medically supported transitions and their remaining
scars: “Post-surgery scars symbolize primal components of pain
and wounding, what the untrammeled image hides. . . . Transi-
tioning becomes a creative project that gains meaning retroac-
tively as an attempt to recreate or repeat a preconscious (pre-
difference) primary phantasized origin, an event that cannot be
symbolized but appears to yearn for meaning” (p. 55). As Gozlan
further notes, the surgery inaugurates a quest for meaning that
very often involves the scar as signifier.
Another metaphor sometimes used by trans* studies scholars
to describe medically assisted bodily transformations is that of
“grafting.” For instance, Noble (2012) writes that the metaphor
of grafting, as opposed to transitioning, allows him to explain
how “one materialization is haunted by the other” (p. 41), thus
forging a merger between (at least) two identifications and phe-
TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT 317

nomenological planes postsurgery. The title of Noble’s article

is, tellingly, “Our Bodies Are Not Ourselves.” Read in Lacanian
terms, the title is suggestive of someone or something in the psy-
chic space of the subject. This Other has, in Noble’s description, a
haunting presence that is intercepted at the level of the body. The
metaphor of grafting is, in my mind, not unlike what Lacan calls
a “cross-cap”: a dialectic joiner that is also a projective plane. The
cross-cap has a Mobius-like connectivity, even after it is cut. Lacan
(2014) explains that the cut in the cross-cap “isolates something
that is defined as embodying what is non-specularizable” (p. 206).
The cut, which has a separating function, enables us to articu-
late something in excess of the image, precisely that which is not
specularizable. The cross-cap is not a castrating cut so much as
it is a function that enables subjectivization and conjures up the
subject’s a. It is my view that gender-confirming surgeries, hor-
mone therapies, trans* autobiographical writings, or whatever is
used to orchestrate a transition can function therapeutically like
the Lacanian cross-cap. A surgical cut, for example, can renew
the subject’s relationship to the remainder because it touches the
Real. As such, it has a symbolic function. “This remainder sus-
tains and drives desire, as we have learnt to ascertain in the ana-
lytic function of the partial object” (Lacan, 2014, p. 231). Ideally,
a transition will ignite desire by operating upon the Real. Perhaps
a surgical cut (real or metaphorical) can function like a change of
address, whereby the subject’s lack appears anew.

TRANSLINGUISTICS

While much trans* scholarly literature focuses (as it must) on the

material realities of transpeople, there are, also, important ele-
ments of trans* experience that cannot be seen or visually rati-
fied. It follows that the “Thing” at stake in trans* representation
is Real. The Lacanian Real is in excess of the word-image. It is that
component of our psychical being that cannot be articulated. It
is, for Lacan, more real than reality. The body is quintessentially
Real because it is engendered by an unknown signifier. This is
not to say that the body does not have material weight or that
corporeality, anatomy, hormones, and the like are unimportant,
but rather, to say that for Lacan the body is a linguistic event.
318 SHEILA L. CAVANAGH

Let us consider, for example, that Lacan (2002) refers to the Real
as “a punctuation without a text” (p. 324). Read from a trans*
scholarly perspective, this statement is significant. I am reminded
of the asterisk used by the trans* studies scholars Susan Stryker
and Paisley Currah (2014) to symbolize an “open-ended search”
for the “inherently unfinishable combinatorial work of the trans-
prefix” (p. 1). Or let us revisit the hyphen that follows “Trans” in
the “Trans-, Trans, or Transgender” introduction to a 2008 special
issue of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly. As the coeditors explain,

[the] little hyphen is perhaps too flimsy a thing to carry as much

conceptual freight as we intend for it to bear, but we think the
hyphen matters a great deal, precisely because it marks the dif-
ference between the implied nominalism of “trans” and the
explicit relationality of “trans-,” which remains open-ended and
resists premature foreclosure by attachment to any single suffix.
(Stryker, Currah, & Moore, 2008, p. 11)

The special issue is, not coincidentally, concerned with “categori-

cal crossings, leakages, and slips of all sorts” relating to “-gender,
-national, -racial, -generational, -genic, -species,” and so on (Stryk-
er et al., 2008, p. 11). The coeditors insist (rightfully, I might add)
that gender cannot consolidate or stabilize all that “could be de-
nominated ‘trans’” (Stryker et al., 2008, p. 11). The quest is thus
not about finding another word—there is a proliferation of words
and letters being added to the LGBTQ2+ acronym. It is, rather,
about the nonsignificatory extra that is central to being trans*
that ultimately matters.
As the editors infer, grappling with “transgender phenomena”
(Stryker et al., 2008, p. 11) requires a break with language as we
know it. It follows that what counts as transgender phenomenon
must be understood through a suspension of dominant (and often
cisgender sex-specific) linguistic sensibilities. There must, in oth-
er words, be a linguistic deferral placed upon the words, prefixes,
and pronouns used to address others as subjects. Lacan might
call the transgender asterisk or hyphen a necessary punctuation
of speech. This would not be because he endorses the prolifera-
tion of genders—he spoke about sexual positioning, not gender.
It would, rather, be because he is interested in what linguistics,
which he calls linguistricks, does to subjects. Lacanian psycho-
TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT 319

analysis is thus focused upon language, the words, signifiers, and

narrative structure specific to a given analysand’s discourse.
Linguists are interested in the rhyme, meter, and consequent
patterning of a given verse. Stress is inevitably placed upon cer-
tain syllables, over others, in, for example, English poetry. Lin-
guistic systems are developed to identify the scansion of a poem
where there is a break between lines. Lacan borrowed heavily
from linguistics to develop his psychoanalytic technique. One of
his more controversial techniques is the scansion famously associ-
ated with the short session. Lacan would end a session whenever
the client said something significant in order to punctuate the
discursive event. His intention was to accentuate a novel break
in the subject’s narrative. Lacan sought to illuminate and alter
a fundamental fantasy narrated through the particularities of a
subject’s discourse. By altering the stress placed on a given word
(or syllable), by highlighting, repeating, or omitting a word, by
punctuating a statement with an abrupt end to the session, and
so forth, Lacan sought to impose a new caesura: a novel pause,
marked by a break, in the discourse of the patient.

THE MONSTER-LIKE THING IN TRANS* STUDIES

For Lacan, objet a is the missing text that does not (cannot) enter
the Symbolic. The objet a is the underside of the Symbolic. It is
precisely that which cannot be written or captured by sight. Objet
a introduces a void and causes anxiety for the subject. It is a “re-
mainder, this residue, this object whose status escapes the status
of the object derived from the specular image, that is, the laws of
transcendental aesthetics” (Lacan, 2014, p. 40). In the “signifying
dialectic [there is] something that is separated off, something that
is sacrificed, something inert, and this something is the pound of
flesh” (Lacan, 2014, p. 219). Objet a disturbs the significatory or-
der of things. It is a scrap, a left-over of the Real remaining after a
cut made by the signifier. The a does not work like a signifier. To
be precise, it “symbolizes that which, in the sphere of the signifier,
always presents itself as lost, as what gets lost in signifierization”
(Lacan, 2014, p. 174). Lacan is making the claim that there is a
symbol that has been excised in the course of subjectivization¾
a symbol relevant to the subject’s being. There is something that
320 SHEILA L. CAVANAGH

cannot be assimilated by the signifier, namely, the subject’s origi-

nal existence. Objet a stubbornly remains after the signifier consti-
tutes the subject. The non-image is uncanny. It is an invasive dou-
ble. Explained in yet another way, objet a is the “virtual image of a
real image, nothing appears” (2014, p. 40, emphasis in original).
Trans* studies animates the missing text (or signifier) central
to being. If we understand objet a to animate desire and also to
be a non-object (something that does not materialize), it may be
that trans* studies circles around the Thing that cannot, strictly
speaking, be said (or seen). This is not a critique of trans* studies!
Rather, it is an observation meant to highlight the difficult and
important work of explicating the invisible in the visible. Like
the Lacanian metaphor of the vase that shapes and gives form
to a vacuum, trans* studies—especially the focus on experience
in trans* memoirs, autobiographies, case studies, and the like—
effectively zero in on the Thing that does not strictly speaking
exist: objet a. Trans* studies scholarship, like desire in Lacanian
terms, circles around the Thing at stake in being. In other words,
trans* studies seeks, among other things, to narrate something
central to being that is eclipsed by cisgender cultures. This is well
demonstrated by the focus upon trans* experience in memoirs,
autobiographies, case studies, and the like.
Desire is said to inhabit the Thing as an empty field. It cannot
be materialized as such, but takes on the structure of a demand.
This is not a superficial-narcissistic demand, but rather an all too
human need to have acknowledged something central to being
that is lacking Symbolic support. If, as Lacan illustrates in his defi-
nitional equation, desire is what remains after need is subtracted
from demand, the lost objet a causes desire. Desire “enters the lair
where it has been waited for all eternity in the shape of the object
that I am in so far as it exiles me from my subjectivity, by deciding
on its own all the signifiers to which this subjectivity is attached.
(Lacan, 2014, p. 48, emphasis in original)
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Thing (which in Lacan’s 1959-
60 Seminar [Lacan, 1992], he calls das Ding) is significant and,
ultimately, linked to objet a. After his seminar on ethics, Lacan
largely abandons the term Thing (and das Ding) and uses objet a.
The Thing haunts us all, regardless of trans* status, and is, from
a psychoanalytic point of view, our destiny. The specificity of the
Thing to which we are indebted sets parameters upon who we
TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT 321

can become. The Thing is “that which in the real suffers from the
signifier” (Lacan, 1992, p. 125). Lacan explains that we fashion
the signifier “in the image of the Thing, whereas the Thing is
characterized by the fact that it is impossible for us to imagine it”
(Lacan, 1992, p. 125). The Lacanian Thing is beyond symboliza-
tion and not an imaginary object. Lyotard (2004) calls the Thing
a creditor. It is, he says, encrypted in the unconscious. As such, it
is a disassociated double: “The Thing which without demand may
command the work, and the Voice, even inaudible, that calls for
action to be right and judgement to be just” (p. 110).
For Lyotard, the body is not an organism consistent with its
material coordinates in time and space. His idea of the singular
body is “neither the sensory motor body of the psychologist nor
the culturally normed body of the anthropologist, but the monster
inhabited by the Thing” (Lyotard, 2004, p. 112, emphasis in origi-
nal). As such, the body is not (only) what is seen by a doctor but
an “indeterminate concealment and dimensionless place of a face-
less Thing” (pp. 112-113). The body is multiple beyond compre-
hension and holds within it that which is beyond or in excess of
consciousness, representation, or articulation. This Thing, that is
“encrypted on” the body, endows the subject with both dread and
potentiality, for one cannot represent it with certainty; one can,
however, pay witness to it through art. (See, for example, Stein-
bock’s [2014] writing on the spasm and the punctum in Cassilis’s
performance art. Steinbok illustrates how what cannot be seen,
what I would call the “Thing” bothering the subject, escapes the
photograph but is registered by the photographic flash, which
cannot strictly speaking, be seen. The “Thing” is monstrous, in
part, because it exceeds vision and cannot be articulated.)
Locke (2013) finds a parallel between Lyotard’s notion of the
monstrous body and his theoretical treatment of infancy. Both
the body in its monstrous hollowness and its susceptibility to af-
fectation, and infancy in its cognitive and expressive primitive-
ness, have a quality of mute inarticularity. Importantly, however,
both the body and infancy also hold a “nascent” potentiality for
imaginative representation. As Locke (2013) writes, “It is in and
through the ‘Thing’, re-inscribed here as the infant body, where
the potentially fertile ground for creativity can be located, and it
is this ground of undetermined multiplicity that Lyotard sees in
need of theorizing” (n.p.). This reading puts Lyotard’s work on
322 SHEILA L. CAVANAGH

the Thing, the vestiges of which haunt all subjects, into relation
with his earlier work in The Postmodern Condition (1984).
For Lyotard, the postmodern condition is marked by a nos-
talgic longing for subjective and representational totality. Rather
than striving for symmetry between an Idea and its illustrative
representation, Lyotard (1984) champions the imaginative imper-
ative at work in art and writing. As he explains, “the emphasis can
be placed, rather, on the power of the faculty to conceive, in its
‘inhumanity’ so to speak . . . , since it is not the business of our
understanding whether or not human sensibility or imagination
can match what it conceives (pp. 79-80).
Thus, the imperative for postmodern art, according to Lyotard
(2004), is to struggle against the domesticating injunction of cul-
ture to form, to determine, to normalize. Art may pay witness
to the Thing when it allows for those conceptions that hold the
power to shock us into forgetting what we know through conven-
tion, rendering us silent so we may embark on the work of anam-
nesis (p. 118).
For Lyotard, the monstrous body is one perceptive to affect
but still incapable of articulation. It is the body that senses with-
out cognition. As Locke (2013) explains, “this ‘monster’ exists
only when prodded out of anaesthesia, inciting a move away from
idleness by the aesthetic affect (n.p.).4 When Stryker issues her
words to Victor Frankenstein in her now-seminal article on trans-
gender rage, she was describing an acute awareness of the way
the body can feel like a monstrous Thing when gender identity is
negated or, conversely, imposed without consent. While she quite
correctly describes the way trans* embodiments are read as mon-
strous in transphobic cultures, from a Lacanian perspective all
bodies are monstrous and disturb being. This is because the a
produces an uncomfortable (jouissant) excess. What may distin-
guish trans* and non-trans embodiment is the degree to which
one apprehends the Thing within the monstrous body and its cre-
ative potential. While transpeople may very often be eclipsed by
the monstrous (often transphobic) desire of the Other, we should
also recognize the creative potential that is unlocked when the
nostalgic longing for totalizing coherence is relinquished in favor
of imaginative conception. As Lyotard (2004) contends: “Some
may have had the fortune to avoid this deadly rearrangement [be-
tween abandonment to the Thing and acculturation] because of
TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT 323

being formed and remaining hollow, of feeling accompanied all

the time by the Thing that prevents them from being at home in
the world, from submitting to common knowledge, taste, tradi-
tion” (p. 112). Recognition of the multiplicity of the body, of ex-
perience beyond consciousness may give some trans* individuals
significatory access to the Thing.
In a relatively early paper (written in 1948) titled “Aggressive-
ness in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan (2002) posits a psychoanalytic no-
tion of body-space that differs significantly from the way sociolo-
gists of the body conceptualize embodiment as material. Lacan
(2014) introduces us to his notion of “trans-space” (p. 39) to illus-
trate the effect of the Thing on our being. Lacan uses the concep-
tion of “trans-space” to refer to how the mirror leaves “intuitive
elements within reach” (p. 39). These intuitive elements, relevant
to the body, are central to all speaking beings. “I would say that
it is the subjective possibility of the mirror projection of such a
field [a spatial field] into the other’s field that gives human space
its originally ‘geometrical’ structure, a structure I would willingly
characterize as kaleidoscopic” (Lacan, 2014, p. 99). Psychical ge-
ometry, as it concerns body-space is, for Lacan, shape shifting.
The body-space is a combinatory field composed of the Imagi-
nary and what materialist geographers call the “objective space
of reality” (Lacan, 2002, p. 99). Provocatively, Lacan (2002) notes
that we, as subjects, need to escape this living-space (and he is
here referring to the notion of Lebensraum, of “living-space”) and
that we do so “with very odd results” (p. 100). I venture to guess
that at least one manifestation of this so-called odd result is a
disidentification with one’s gender assignment at birth. But let
us remember that there are multiple other ways of escaping a
cloistering “living-space” that can have nothing to do with being
trans*, including, for example, anorexia, tattooing, piercing, scar-
ification, and other body modification practices.
A trans-space, in Lacanian terms, is not reducible to reality be-
cause it is circumscribed by the Real. What Lacan calls “trans-
space” is, read from a trans* studies perspective, about what can-
not be seen. It involves an element of existence that escapes the
gaze. Not unlike Lyotard’s (2004) appreciation of the potential of
the Thing-inhabited monstrous body to “jolt” us out of inertia,
Lacan maintains that we must all assume a livable distance from
the mirror to leave ourselves room to be, to constitute our ideal
324 SHEILA L. CAVANAGH

egos. He is concerned with how the mirror enables an imaginary

relation to the Other. He is also focused on how the “[visual] cap-
ture involved in the ideal ego—drag[s] the subject into the field
where he hypostasizes himself in the ego-ideal” (Lacan, 2002, p.
569).
While trans* scholarship and activism focuses on the exclusions
wrought by bi-gender spatial designs (e.g., gendered toilets; Cava-
nagh, 2010) and calls for transpositive space initiatives in schools,
workplace settings, community centers,and so forth (Enke, 2012;
Keegan, 2016), psychic space is equally important and central to
what Stryker and Currah (2014) call transsexual phenomenon.
Psychic encroachments cannot be measured in concrete material
or geopolitical terms. It seems to me that psychoanalysis can help
us to illustrate the psychic erasures transpeople face alongside
the more material and quantifiable systems of institutional exclu-
sion in bi-gender cultures.

CONCLUSION

My theoretical exposition is guided by an interest in bringing

Lacanian psychoanalysis to trans* studies and also trans* studies
to psychoanalysis. There are important areas of cross-pollination
between both fields. Lacan has much to say about the mirror, the
body, linguistics, the cut (as scansion), the Real, the desire of the
Other, and anxiety—all of which are central to trans* scholarly
inquiry, art, and cultural production. The late Parisian psycho-
analyst’s writing on objet a prompts us to question presumptions
about image-based amalgamation and integration. There is, as
Lacan (2002) writes, a “lethal gap of the mirror stage” (p. 476),
but this gap is also generative and ignites desire. My contention
is that both Lacanian psychoanalysis and trans* studies are, albeit
in different ways, concerned with the invisible in the visible. The
cleavage between the Real (beyond the word-image) and reality
(as material substrate) is what incites desire and can also induce
anxiety. What Lacan calls transsexualist jouissance is about this
fundamental tension at the heart of every speaking-being. The
gap, tension, or schism some transpeople feel between gender
identity and sexual morphology can be productively theorized in
terms of the Lacanian notion of objet a.
TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT 325

NOTES

1. I use “trans*” in the broadest possible terms to refer to those who dis-
identify with their gender assignment at birth.
2. It is noteworthy that Lacan’s conception of objet a is a critical response to
Melanie Klein’s work on the body of the mother as object. For Lacan,
objet a involves “the breast, the shit, the voice, the nothing . . . [and] the
more turbulent emotion locked to certain elective objects [more so]
than the object itself” (Cameron, 2013, p. 196).
3. In an interesting article on mirroring in object relations, Lemma (2012)
suggests that “in some cases of transsexuality the primary object(s) did
not mirror and contain an early experience of incongruity between the
given body and the subjective experience of gender” (p. 277). Without
producing a formulaic etiological truth about transsexualities or the
object relations that might engender transsexuality, Lemma investigates
the psychical effects of not being-seen.
4. I thank Caitlin Janzen for her invaluable contribution to my thinking on
Lyotard and his conception of the body.

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