Abandoning Gender “Identity”

International instruments fail to specify the meaning of gender identity. Yet gender identity has been invoked as a prohibited ground of discrimination, particularly in cases concerning trans persons. Trans existences fall outside the expectation of a correspondence between sex and gender. “Trans” is an umbrella term referring to people who do not identify with the sex attributed to them at birth. This broad definition encompasses pre-operative and post-operative transsexuals, as well as persons who have not undergone any medical intervention and do not conform to the social norms of expression and self-identification imposing the binary. Regional conventions do not define the concept of gender identity either. Documents issued by the United Nations (UN) and regional human rights bodies frequently rely on the category, without any clear explanation of the notion, or of what makes gender identity different from gender as such. Relying on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this essay argues that gender is an identity per se and challenges international law's treatment of gender and gender identity as distinct categories. Underlying this essay is the view that questioning the shape that the law gives to “gender identity” is the preliminary step to evaluating what protections human rights law can or cannot offer to individuals.

Subjectivity and Revenge in Karen M. McManus’s One of Us Is Lying

The aim of this paper is to explore the issues of peer rejection and revenge among adolescents through their portrayal in young adult literature (YAL). Adopting the lens of Lacanian theory on subjectivity and desire, the paper analyses a revenge plot in Karen M. McManus’s novel One of Us Is Lying and its origins. It argues that peer rejection contributes to contradictory self-concepts; how adolescent characters view themselves clash at some point with how others regard them, leading them to seek retribution. Their attempt at revenge will be examined along the lines of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the paper argues that their revenge is driven by the impulse to fulfil the Other’s desire, which eventually fails due to the unobtainable nature of the desire itself.

Enjoying an Empty Edifice

This paper reaffirms the methodological potentials of Lacanian psychoanalysis for the theories of nationalism. From the Lacanian perspective, national consciousness and self-determination are only possible in the fantasmatic frame­work through the (mis)recognition and retroactive construction. National imagination is the form of transference, necessary for performing the nation through invented traditions and rituals. However, beyond symbolization and imaginary (mis)recognition, there is always something that resists closure, linked with the subjects' desire and organized around the lack of the subjects' full enjoyment. Taking together all these aspects, we build an analytical framework for the study of nationalism, which comprises a quadruple system of identifications by referring to the concepts of Ideal-Ego, Ego-Ideal, Super-Ego and specular Other, and illustrate it through the example of the AKP's Turkish nationalism.

Christian Metz

The film theory of Christian Metz (b. 1931–d. 1993) forms part of the structuralist revolution of ideas that challenged the phenomenology prevalent in France in the 1950s. Metz developed a structuralist (or its derivative, semiological) theory of film in the 1960s and inaugurated a groundbreaking theory and method of analysis that transformed film into a semiological object, in which film’s specificity was no longer perceived in terms of surface sensory properties or a conscious aesthetic experience. Instead, Metz reconceived filmic specificity, this most sensory of objects, as a type of signification—as the manifestation of a more fundamental, nonobservable, underlying finite abstract system of codes. To conceive film as signification involves a shift in perspective, from the study of film as a consciously experienced, continuous sensory object to the study of the abstract underlying system of discrete (or discontinuous) codes that generates and organizes those experiences. In terms of the history of ideas, semiology parallels the epistemology of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, who argued that an underlying transcendental system of conceptual categories in the mind structures and makes possible human experience. Semiology’s innovation was to replace this underlying transcendental system with a historically and culturally contingent system of underlying codes. In the 1970s Metz addressed the limitations of structuralism and semiology by adopting a post-structuralist framework premised on theories of enunciation, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and phenomenology. For Metz, enunciation (which emphasizes signs of the speaker and receiver in a text) and psychoanalysis (which emphasizes traces of the unconscious in a text) enabled him to rethink his study of codes as secondary systems of signification, which are underpinned and driven by more-fundamental primary processes of signification (unconscious drives, fantasy, and dream logic). In his final work in the early 1990s, Metz developed a theory of filmic enunciation focused on the impersonal traces of a film’s production; that is, enunciative markers that are reflexive, that refer back only to the film itself.