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Queering Gender: Anima/Animus and the Paradigm of Emergence

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Queering Gender: Anima/Animus and the Paradigm of Emergence Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2006, 51, 401–421 Queering gender: anima/animus and the paradigm of emergence Susan McKenzie, Vermont, USA Abstract: An exploration into the world of the queer others of gender and sexuality moves us beyond the binary opposition of male/masculinity and female/femininity in our understanding of gender and expands the meaning of gender and sexuality for all humans. A revision of Jungian gender theory that embraces all genders and sexualities is needed not only to inform our clinical work but also to allow us to bring Jungian thought to contemporary gender theory and to cultural struggles such as gay marriage. The cognitive and developmental neurosciences are increasingly focused on the importance of body biology and embodied experience to the emergence of mind. In my exploration of gender I ask how gender comes to be experienced in a developing body and how those embodied gender feelings elaborate into a conscious category in the mind, a gender position. My understanding of emergent mind theory suggests that one’s sense of gender, like other aspects of the mind, emerges very early in development from a self-organizing process involving an individual’s particular body biology, the brain, and cultural environment. Gendered feeling, from this perspective, would be an emergent aspect of mind and not an archetypal inheritance, and the experiencing body would be key to gender emergence. A revised Jungian gender theory would transcend some of the limitations of Jung’s anima/animus (A/A) gender thinking allowing us to contribute to contemporary gender theory in the spirit of another Jung; the Jung of the symbolic, the mythic, and the subtle body. This is the Jung who invites us to the medial place of the soul, bridging the realm of the physical body and the realm of the spirit. Key words: analytical psychology, emergent mind, gender, homosexuality, Jung, post- Jungian, sexuality, transgender Introduction My research for this paper began in the fall of 1956. I clearly remember the moment. I had just entered the fourth grade and was playing kickball at morn- ing recess in the playground. Dressed in my kickball uniform, blue jeans, T-shirt, and sturdy brown steel-toed oxfords, I was eager to display my skills to the other boys and girls and carve out some athletic territory. After all, I had been the playground kickball champion in my previous school. As I began 0021–8774/2006/5103/401 © 2006, The Society of Analytical Psychology Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 402 Susan McKenzie to play, the playground monitor, a scowling proper older teacher and keeper of the rules of propriety, approached me and pulled me out of the game. In a shaming whisper she told me that girls wear dresses and only boys wear pants. Both playgrounds and prisons have guards and I was abruptly made aware that I was a gender outlaw. This was my first gender trauma, but my feeling of shame was mixed with a touch of quiet rebellion. How could something that felt so right and allowed my body to perform at its highest level be so shamefully wrong. I was too young to challenge conformity then, but I was taking notes for the time when I would be able to stand up to such gender stereotyping. An exploration into the world of the queer others of gender and sexuality moves us beyond the binary opposition of male/masculinity and female/femi- ninity in our understanding of gender and expands the meaning of sexuality for all humans. Queer others force us to examine and transcend our assump- tions about the universality of heterosexuality and to begin to weave a new Jungian approach to gender and sexuality. Such a re-examination is long overdue as cultural battles rage over whether same-sex couples are allowed to marry. In the United States, civil unions for gays and lesbians were legalized in Vermont in 2000 (Lewin 2005). In February 2004, the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared that gays and lesbians must be allowed to marry in the state of Massachusetts (Arce 2004). The mayor of San Francisco also declared that gays and lesbians are to be allowed to marry in his city despite a state law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman (Margot 2004). Civil marriages between same-sex couples have also recently become legal in the UK (Vanderheyden 2005) and same-sex marriage has been legalized in Canada (Panetta 2005). Meanwhile, in reaction to this loosening of gender boundaries, President George W. Bush and the religious right are calling for a constitutional amend- ment to ban gay marriage (Brown 2004). Gay marriage is a civil rights issue that goes to the heart of our cultural, religious, and scientific beliefs about gen- der and sexuality. It is time for a new psychological understanding of identity, gender, and sexuality to inform these beliefs. Jungians, with their recent focus on emergent archetype and emergent mind processes, are well poised to participate in this project. Kate Kate Bornstein is a male to female transsexual and author of the auto- biographical book Gender Outlaw. She takes the reader on a provocative ride through queer gender in the world of the transsexual. As a child, Kate remem- bers playing alone in the basement, where she had rigged up an old chair with ‘all manner of wires and boxes and dials: it was my gender-change machine’ (Bornstein 1994, p. 64). Queering gender: anima/animus and the paradigm of emergence 403 Everyone else seemed to know they were boys or girls or men or women. That’s something I’ve never known; not then, not today. I never got to say to the grown- ups, ‘Hold on there; just what is it about me that makes you think I’m a little boy?’… I was always acting out something that everyone assumed I was. I wonder what it would have been like if someone had come along and in a quite friendly man- ner had asked, ‘Well, young one, what do you think you are: a boy or a girl?’ (pp. 8–9) She writes about the decision to undergo genital surgery, a two-year process involving psychological evaluations, hormone injections, and surgery: I never hated my penis; I hated that it made me a man—in my own eyes, and in the eyes of others. For my comfort, I needed a vagina—I was convinced that the only way I could live out what I thought to be my true gender was to have genital surgery to construct a vagina from my penis. Fortunately, I don’t regret having done this. (p. 47) Kate is in a committed lesbian relationship following her sex change and iden- tifies herself as lesbian. When she reveals that her lesbian lover of several years is undergoing sex-change surgery from female to male, she poses her ultimate challenge to conventional gender thinking. She writes: Can you imagine? I wake up one morning, A nice lesbian like me, I wake up one morning, and I’m living with a man! There were some questions I didn’t want to ask and I’ve been having to ask them: could I live with a man as my lover? and if I could do that, with a man as my lover, what was I? (p. 237) Kate’s story illustrates gender and sexuality residing in the borderlands of Western culture and resonates with postmodern queer theory that denies fixed identities and calls into question the assumed relationships between biological sex, gender, and sexual desire. The term queer can also be used in a dynamic way to describe identity under construction, in the act of becoming. In this sense queer is not an identity but is, instead, a critique of fixed identities. My particular vision about gender and sexuality has developed over many years of analytic work with homo- sexual and transgendered analysands. From what I’ve learned from my transgen- dered analysands and my own experience, I can make the following observations about gender and sexuality: the relationship to one’s own body that we call gender is an individual body/mind experience felt at a very early age. It is expandable over a lifetime and not necessarily related to one’s sexual anatomy. Sexuality, that is, whom we are attracted to, is very complicated and over a lifetime is subject to varying degrees of flexibility concerning the gender traits and sex of the other. 404 Susan McKenzie Kate’s experience of her gender and sexuality was certainly evolving. Kate is a performance artist as well as a writer and was invited to a sexuality confer- ence I attended several years ago. On the evening of her performance, I sat about five feet from her as she walked back and forth in her miniskirt, multi- coloured knit top, and fluorescent heels. She talked about the hard work involved in getting her voice to pass as female, letting her voice go up and down as she described the hours of arduous voice training. The stories of her transsexual life were presented with skill and always with an edge of dark humour. The darkness of the humour deepened for me as I became aware of my growing anxiety. I felt uneasy as Kate told stories of the surgical removal of her male parts and her use of hormones to develop her femaleness, and her constant fear of being confronted as a man trying to pass as a woman. I began to think clinically about her, guiltily wanting to diagnose this person who was making me so uncomfortable! Her powerful transsexual appearance was pushing my personal transgendered limits; my gender position was de-integrating.
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