The Sex/Gender Split, Transsexualism, and the Psychoanalytic Engineering of Capitalist Life
The Sex/Gender Split, Transsexualism, and the Psychoanalytic Engineering of Capitalist Life
This chapter analyzes the clinical theories and practices of US psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller, who developed the sex/gender split and the idea of gender identity in the 1960s in his work on transsexuality and transvestism. Stoller’s work entrenched sex and gender into the biology/culture binary, where biology and culture represented two separate, but causally linked, orders of knowledge. The chapter shows how the sex/gender binary operated to control biology (sex) through culture (gender). The analysis is placed in the postwar psychoanalytic revolution that functioned to standardize and normalize individuals into a bourgeois social model founded on the wholesome nuclear family. Psychoanalysis, the chapter argues, enabled the de-politicization of the stricter postwar sexual division of labor and capitalist production, while the sex/gender split became a psychoanalytic apparatus to ensure that women as housewives socialized male children into masculine, middle-class workers.
Keywords: transsexualism, transvestism, Robert J. Stoller, nuclear family, psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic apparatus, gender identity
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