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IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
Actas del IV Congreso Estatal Isonomía sobre Identidad de Género vs. Identidad Sexual
Comité Científico Asesor:
Aguilar Ródenas, Consol
Barberá Heredia, Esther
Beguiristain Alcorta, Mª Teresa
Bosch Fiol, Esperanza
Esquembre Valdés, Mar
Ferrer Pérez, Victoria
Fischer Pfaeffle, Amalia Eugenia
Galán Serrano, Julia
Gámez Fuentes, Mª José
Garrigues Giménez, Amparo
Nieva de la Paz, Pilar
Olaria Puyoles, Carmen
Saucedo González, Irma
Sevilla Merino, Julia
Téllez Infantes, Anastasia
Urios Moliner, Yago
Ventura Franch, Asunción
Vilches de Frutos, Mª Francisca
Zafra Alcaraz, Remedios
Coordinadora técnica de la edición: Carme Pinyana Garí
Coordinadora de la publicación: Alicia Gil Gómez
Traducción del artículo de Teresa de Lauretis: Marta Renau Michavila
Copyright del texto: Las autoras, 2008
Copyright de la presente edición:
Fundación Isonomía para la Igualdad de Oportunidades. Universitat Jaume I, 2008
http://isonomia.uji.es
isonomia@isonomia.uji.es
Tel. 34/964 72 91 34
Fax 34/964 72 91 35
Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I. Servei de Comunicació i Publicacions,
Campus del Riu Sec. Edifici Rectorat i Serveis Centrals. 12071 Castelló de la Plana
http://tenda.uji.es
publicacions@uji.es
Tel. 964 72 82 33
Fax 964 72 82 32
ISBN: 978-84-691-5638-4
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
ÍNDICE
Presentación...................................................................................................................
9
I. CONFERENCIAS
Gender identities and bad habits...................................................................................
13
TERESA DE LAURETIS
Sobre las discontinuidades sexo-género-deseo en el arte contemporáneo...................
24
ERNEST ALCOBA
Transexualidad y feminismo: una relación incómoda.....................................................
66
BEATRIZ GIMENO
Di-Versifi caciones identitarias. Polifonías del Versus.....................................................
77
MERI TORRAS Y BEGONYA SÁEZ
II. MESAS REDONDAS
3
MESA 1
Las identidades sexuales en la ciencia y la salud
La construcción de la identidad de género y la representación de la maternidad
en la adolescencia..........................................................................................................
89
MARÍA ANGÉLICA CARVALLO Y AMPARO MORENO
Identidades sexuales en la ciencia y la salud.................................................................
99
CARMEN VALLS-LLOBET
MESA 2
La construcción de la identidad sexual y del género
Identidad sexual y coeducación...................................................................................... 106
ROSA LUENGO Y PRUDENCIA GUTIÉRREZ
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
MESA 3
Orientación sexual, erotismo, vínculo emocional y amor
El amor y la sexualidad en las sociedades post-modernas: el discurso fílmico.............
112
MARÍA LAMEIRAS
Las difi cultades sociales de las personas transexuales.................................................
122
JAVIER MONTILLA
El erotismo......................................................................................................................
132
ELISA COBOS
Introducción a la mesa redonda: Orientación sexual, erotismo, vínculo emocional
y amor.............................................................................................................................
136
ROSARIO ALTABLE
MESA 4
Las identidades sexo/género en la cultura y el arte
Biografía intelectual y refl exividad. Veinte años de investigación sobre élites
profesionales femeninas.................................................................................................
139
MA. ANTONIA GARCÍA DE LEÓN ÁLVAREZ
4
MESA 5
Las identidades sexuales: ética vs. estética
Ética vs. estética.............................................................................................................
148
MAITE BEGUIRISTAIN
MESA 6
Identidades: cultura queer y ciberespacio
Ganímedes emancipado: cine español, adolescencia y homosexualidad.....................
152
JUAN CARLOS ALFEO
Fracturas de género en la red: reivindicaciones de los colectivos sociales...................
166
ORIOL RÍOS
Identidades de género e identidades sexuales:
unas notas sobre feminismo(s) queer............................................................................
171
GRACIA TRUJILLO
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
MESA 7
Derechos sexuales e identidad de género
Desenmascaramiento del partido socialista respecto a los logros conseguidos
por el colectivo de gays, lesbianas, bisexuales y transexuales......................................
179
MANUELA TRASOBARES
La reconstrucción de la memoria histórica transexual y transgénero como paso
imprescindible para la plena igualdad……………………………………………………....
181
CARMEN GARCÍA
Etnicidad, cultura e identidades de género: los bijagós (Guinea Bissau) y
los zapotecas (México)................................................................................................... 183
ÁGUEDA GÓMEZ
III. COMUNICACIONES
Publicidad e identidad andrógina...................................................................................
195
SUSANA ANDRÉS DEL CAMPO, RODRIGO GONZÁLEZ y ROCÍO COLLADO
La lucha por la igualdad de las mujeres del liberalismo a la Segunda República..........
200
NATIVIDAD ARAQUE
5
El discurso religioso en la construcción del cuerpo femenino y el cuerpo masculino....
207
VIRGINIA ÁVILA
La política de lo privado: de la denuncia ética a la estética............................................
214
SUSANA CARRO
Partir de la experiencia como elemento transformador................................................... 223
ANDREA GARCÍA, ANA ISABEL SIMÓN y GRUPO
La política sexual en la literatura de Quim Monzó. Una anàlisi exemplifi cadora
d’alguns contes de El perquè de tot plegat....................................................................
227
ADA GARCÍA RIBERA
Escribir contra la norma: identidad, género y narración en el cine de mujeres..............
234
SILVIA GUILLAMÓN
Identidad sexual, personas con discapacidad y sida...................................................... 241
PURIFICACIÓN HERAS
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
Cuando la identidad de género converge con la identidad cultural: la fi gura simbólica
de la mujer musulmana en el discurso cultural esencialista...........................................
248
ELENA HERNÁNDEZ
Rasgos expresivos y actitudes sexistas en docentes universitarios españoles............
253
MARÍA LAMEIRAS, YOLANDA RODRÍGUEZ, MARÍA VICTORIA CARRERA Y MARÍA CALADO
Perspectiva de género en la producción artística de artistas españolas........................
259
PILAR MUÑOZ
Las identidades sexo/género en el arte.......................................................................... 270
IRENE PELAYO
Mujer, computadoras y videojuegos...............................................................................
275
VERÓNICA PERALES Y FRED ADAM
Casarnos y rectifi carnos: la normalización y la disidencia sexual.................................. 279
RAQUEL PLATERO, PALOMA FERNÁNDEZ Y GRUPO
Representaciones de género en revistas femeninas para adolescentes.
Comparativa entre publicaciones españolas y latinoamericanas...................................
285
JUAN PLAZA
6
Sujetos del género: postestructuralismo y psicoanálisis en Judith Buter.......................
291
LETICIA INÉS SABSAY
Derecho Penal Sexual: la prostitución............................................................................
298
FRANCISCO SANHAUJA
Algunas aportaciones de la Ley Orgánica de Igualdad al problema del acoso sexista
en el trabajo....................................................................................................................
304
MARIOLA SERRANO
Dentro del diálogo inter-cultural feminista ¿Cuál es el color/clase social y orientación
sexual del paradigma feminista género/sexo?...............................................................
309
XIANA SOTELO
El apellido materno: historia de una discriminación difícil de superar............................
316
GEMA TOMÁS
Análisis del videoclip downtown de peaches................................................................
323
LAURA VALERO
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
IV. CONCLUSIONES
Taller 1
Las identidades sexo/género en la cultura y el arte.......................................................
332
Taller 2
La construcción de la identidad sexual y de género......................................................
334
Taller 3
Orientación sexual, erotismo, vínculo emocional y amor...............................................
336
Taller 4
Las identidades sexuales en la ciencia y la salud..........................................................
338
Taller 5
Las identidades sexuales: ética vs. estética...................................................................
340
Taller 6
Identidades: cultura queer y ciberespacio...................................................................... 342
7
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
8
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
EL PROGRAMA DEL IV CONGRESO ISONOMÍA, «Identidad de género versus identidad sexual»,
pretendía profundizar y debatir en torno a la identidad, por cuanto están afl orando dife-
rentes modos de estar en el mundo y de relacionarse tanto con los y las demás como con
uno o con una misma. Así las cosas, y aunque es cierto que la identidad siempre ha marcado
la existencia humana, hoy, más que nunca, cada persona necesita no sólo saber cómo es y
quién es ella misma sino también quién y cómo es la otra y las otras personas con quienes
se relaciona e incluso cómo es percibida por su entorno próximo, personal, y lejano: el con-
junto de la sociedad.
Para complicar aún más este marco de relaciones y de incertidumbres, en ocasiones los
sujetos se sienten invadidos por sus cuerpos de manera que se perciben vertebrados en
torno a una serie de percepciones, valores, comportamientos, actitudes y aptitudes distintas
a las que la sociedad ha proyectado, a través de la educación, para él o para ella atendiendo
a sus características sexuales biológicas. Es decir, que mientras que la sociedad espera que
un ser humano nacido hombre tenga comportamientos asociados a la masculinidad o que,
de nacer mujer, se comporte de manera femenina, existen seres humanos que se sienten
radicalmente extraños a estas demandas contra las que se rebelan, posicionándose en con-
tra hasta el punto de necesitar cambiar su condición sexual biológica para sentirse seres
9
humanos íntegros, personas con una-otra identidad ajustada a su ser, a su sentir, a su estar
en el mundo ajenos a lo que el mundo les demanda.
Además, entre la bipolarización producida entre quienes se pliegan sin dar respuesta al-
guna al papel que les ha sido asignado a partir de su condición sexual y quienes se rebelan
absolutamente, existen múltiples matices que afectan a todas las personas, pues ningún
hombre es estrictamente masculino ni existe mujer alguna que responda, una por una, a
todas las características asociadas a la feminidad, dándose lo que conocemos como subjeti-
vidad. Subjetividad que nuestra sociedad obvia, organizándose en función de una supuesta
«objetividad» sostenida por estereotipos a partir de los cuales se regula qué es «ser normal»
y qué no lo es, cuáles son las «relaciones normales» y cuales no, abriendo así enormes bre-
chas que distancian a unas personas de otras, que las discriminan, que las ponen en riesgo
de exclusión o que las someten a insufribles grados de infelicidad.
Por otra parte, la incursión de las tecnologías y la denominada sociedad del conoci-
miento está provocando transformaciones en el imaginario colectivo y generando nuevos
códigos comunicativos que modifi can los modelos no sólo de relaciones personales, sino
también sociales, culturales, económicos, científi cos, afectando incluso al transcurrir de
la historia y confi gurando nuevas dimensiones en las medidas de «tiempo-espacio», de
«ser-estar-tener».
Así mismo, la entrada masiva de las mujeres en la escena pública ha producido impactos
que están provocando transformaciones, sustantivas y sensibles, que trascienden las tradi-
cionales relaciones de género afectadas por la división sexual del trabajo. Igualmente, en el
ámbito del conocimiento, el impacto de las teorías críticas feministas está revolucionando
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
la idea unicista de razón, saber y verdad, incorporando dinámicas, didácticas, métodos y
epistemologías más plurales y participativas.
En este sentido, la amplitud del campo normativo y procedimental en materia de igual-
dad y de género, está facilitando la entrada de sujetos diversos en los espacios de toma de
decisiones que, sin duda, impactarán y modifi carán tanto los valores como las maneras de
hacer, teniendo repercusiones imprevisibles, tanto positivas como negativas, sobre la forma
de ejercer el poder que tendrá que atender la existencia de diversos modelos de personas
y las diferencias de sus necesidades y deseos bien para responder a sus expectativas, bien
para ejercer mayor control aún sobre sus destinos.
Así las cosas, tener en cuenta la diversidad identitaria no es aplazable pues todo lo
expuesto se está desarrollando, ya, en un contexto social y económico en el que se con-
funden los conceptos «tener» y «ser», de manera que a veces parece que somos lo que
tenemos o, por el contrario, que tenemos lo que somos, generando más desigualdad, más
vulnerabilidad, más dolor del que arrastra una sociedad singularmente dicotomizada si no
se producen cambios sustantivos que abran espacios a la pluralidad y a la aceptación y el
respeto a la diferencia.
Para abordar estos temas, y otros más, la Fundación Isonomía, a través de la organiza-
ción de este cuarto congreso, abrió un espacio de refl exión, en torno a cómo la creación de
la construcción de la identidad personal desde un único modelo afecta a cada persona, a la
identidad colectiva y, por ende, al conjunto de la sociedad. Un espacio donde se encontraron
algunas de las diferentes alternativas que se vienen articulando con la fi nalidad de superar
los obstáculos, de identifi car los aspectos positivos y negativos de la diversidad y de dar ran-
go de «normal» a cualquier conducta y/o comportamiento humano, marcando como único
10
límite el respeto de la voluntad y de la libertad del otro o de la otra.
Así, el programa del congreso, elaborado desde la perspectiva de los derechos humanos,
mantuvo los principios que los alimentan, pues una sociedad rica en derechos es una socie-
dad más libre, justa, respetuosa y democrática, porque los derechos no obligan a ser aquello
que no se desea ser, ni a relacionarse desde valores ajenos a cada ideología o sensibilidad,
por el contrario, los derechos garantizan la diversidad, el respeto a la diferencia y al desarro-
llo integral de las y los individuos.
Asumiendo estos principios, las y los participantes contribuyeron con su opinión, con su
conocimiento, con su experiencia, en la profundización de temas secularmente ocultados,
invisibilizados, a veces perseguidos, estigmatizados, de modo que, entre todas y todos,
encontramos, intercambiamos y aplicamos las claves que, a partir de este encuentro, nos
van a facilitar minimizar el impacto del dolor, así como dar luz y rango de pluralidad a la
restringida idea de que «lo normal» es un concepto único, contribuyendo cada quién, des-
de sus áreas de conocimiento, desde sus experiencias vitales, desde sus posibilidades
comunicativas y emotivas, a que seamos más felices visibilizando otras maneras de rela-
cionarnos tanto con uno o con una misma como con «lo otro», con las y los demás, con el
mundo donde está teniendo lugar el desarrollo de los diferentes mundos que constituyen
nuestras realidades cotidianas, emocionales, culturales, artísticas, sociales, históricas,
científi cas, tecnológicas, económicas...
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
Algunas de las personas que han participado en este congreso nos han dejado testimo-
nio de sus trabajos de investigación, de sus refl exiones y análisis, que han sido recogidos
en esta actas cuya lectura deseamos que os produzca tanto placer como el que, el equipo
de la Fundación Isonomía, tuvimos disfrutando con la generosidad y la cercanía de todas y
cada una de las personas que asististeis a este IV Congreso que sin vuestra presencia no
hubiera sido posible realizar.
ALICIA GIL GÓMEZ
Coordinadora general y gerente de la Fundación Isonomía
11
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
12
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
GENDER IDENTITIES AND BAD HABITS
( IdentIdades de género y malos hábItos)
Teresa de LaureTis
I am delighted to be back in castellón after several years, and I’m honored to have been
invited to open the work of this conference. The statement of purpose on the Isonomía web
site indicates that this conference is intended as a space in which lo normal, the norm or
normativity, is open to question, under erasure, deprived of its power to discriminate, exclude,
disfigure, wound, or kill; a space of open and public reflection on the construction of identities
and the articulation of diversities in the human community. The conference invites all of us
to contribute our knowledges, our experiences, our diversities to the collective process of
learning; learning how to relate both to oneselves and to one another in such a way that we
can all be happier.
Sexual IdentIty / Gender IdentIty?
It was only after reading this statement of purpose —a purpose with which I agree
wholeheartedly— that I started wondering about the title chosen for the conference: Identitad
de Género vs. Identitad sexual. The word versus (vs) seemed to me ambiguous if not 13
inappropriate because versus signifies opposition in a binary system. In what way are sexual
identity and gender identity opposed, I wondered? The concept of gender, as it was first
developed politically by Anglo-American feminism in the 1970s, is by now clearly understood
as a social construction; thus the term sexual identity to which it is opposed would seem to
imply that sexual identity is not a social construction but its opposite, i.e., something innate,
given at birth, something one is born with. However, the idea that sexual identity is innate
in the human body is in contrast with everything I know, personally and as a scholar, about
sexuality.
So I kept asking myself what the phrase sexual identity might mean. The first answer I
came up with was: sexual identity may mean a personal identity or a sense of self based on
one’s sexual orientation, one’s sexual object or desire —as in someone saying «I’m a lesbian.
I can only find sexual satisfaction with women»; or «I’m gay, I’m a man who is sexually
attracted only to men». This kind of identity is based on what, not many years ago, in the
wake of gay and lesbian studies, used to be called sexual preference, that is to say, what type
of person, what kind of body one is attracted to —female or male, same-sex or hetero sex.
That fact this expression is no longer in usage in queer studies suggests that we no longer
think of male and female bodies as two absolutely distinct and mutually exclusive categories.
And this in spite of the fact that bodies are still so classified in legal and medical terms.
Nevertheless, even if sexual identity were understood as personal identity based on
sexual preference, it would not be opposed to gender: one can be a lesbian with masculine
or feminine gender identifications, or a combination of both, and see herself accordingly as
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
butch or femme or both depending on the situation, on her age or circumstances, on her
woman partner, and so on.
The second answer I came up with was: sexual identity is a personal identity or a sense
of self based on one’s perception of one’s own body, on the body as it feels, rather than on
the actual morphology of the body. Here one’s sexual identity would be based on the sense
of a self living in a wrong or alien body, as we know from the narratives of transsexuals and
the personal accounts of individuals with Body Integrity Identity Disorder. In this case the
relation of sexual identity to gender identity can be even further articulated and complicated.
The point is, in all these cases sexual identity is not opposed to gender identity but, on the
contrary, it is imbricated in it in complex and often contradictory ways. And one more thing:
sexual identity has much to do with the body. I’ll come back to this later.
So in what sense can sexual identity be opposed to gender identity? Only, it would seem,
if «sexual identity» is what is written in my passport or ID card;1 as if a person’s entire life,
the experiences, memories, fantasies, feelings and emotions that constitute one’s personal
history could be boiled down or reduced to one of two words that someone else wrote in a
birth certificate: either male or female. And yet the question of sexual identity is not so easy
to answer precisely because of its interconnection with gender —and not only with gender
but also with other parameters of personal identity formation: race, class, ethnicity, religion,
even regionalism. All of these, like gender, are not simply personal but eminently social and
strongly inflect or overdetermine an individual’s apprehension and self-attribution of gender
and sexual identities. Let me give you two examples.
In the early 1980s, before a public reading of her poetry at Stanford University in California,
Audre Lorde identified herself to her audience with these words: «I am a black feminist lesbian
14
warrior poet mother». In the mid 70s, another Afro-American feminist scholar and activist,
Barbara Smith, showed how women’s experience is articulated not only in terms of sexual
and gender identity but also in racial terms, so that neither white women nor black men can
easily comprehend how black women experience racism.2 Let me say it another way: from
a position that is presumed to be racially unmarked —say, the position of a white Western
person— one might think that all black people experience racism while black women also
experience sexism in addition. But what Smith was saying was that black women experience
racism not as «blacks» but as black women: «We struggle together with Black men against
racism» she wrote, while also struggling against the heterosexism in Black men.3
That statement, made by a black lesbian collective in the militant 1970s about the
intersection of race, gender, and sexual identity is the first instance of intersectional theory.
Of course, today’s notion of intersectionality includes other parameters of identity that have
emerged in recent history and that derive, in particular, from the global movement of labor:
ethnic origin, religion, color, and level of education, to name a few. But still today what Gloria
Wekker in The Netherlands and Kimberlé Crenshaw in the US call «intersectional theory»,
1. Identification card, in English; identity card in Italian ( carta d’identità).
2. See Barbara Smith, ‘Toward a Black Feminist Criticism’, in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1982), p. 162.
3. ‘The Combahee River Collective Statement’, in Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), pp. 274-78.
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
and what Stuart Hall in England, after Ernesto Laclau, calls a «theory of articulation» are
facing the old dangers of racism and general conservatism as well as the new danger of a
rising neoliberalism.4
With this in mind, let us go back to the conference theme, and the relation of gender
identity to sexual identity. I’d like now to examine these two terms, gender and sexuality,
and something of their historical context and current usage, and then look at their relation
in identity formation. In so doing, I may propose a perhaps surprising idea —that gender
and sexuality, however interconnected in lived experience, are indeed two quite different
things, and it is gender identification, and only very rarely sexuality, that makes up personal
identity.
Gender
Take the word gender, to start with. The meaning of gender as «classification of sex»5
is an acceptation specific to the English language and formally recorded in dictionaries in
addition to that of grammatical category. It had no equivalent in romance languages until
recently, when it was introduced as a neologism, as in the title of this conference; for the
Spanish género, like the Italian genere or the French genre, did not carry the denotation of a person’s gender. That was conveyed in part by the word for sex, which was also used
in English until the past century, and in fact has been retained in the typically conservative
language of bureaucracy and the law.
In Anglophone countries, then, from the late1960s up to the early 1980s, the critical study
15
of gender was virtually an exclusive concern of feminist studies, as it was the notion of
sexual difference, with which it was often synonymous.6 Much had been written, of course, in
psychology and anthropology on gender identity and sex roles, from Robert Stoller’s Sex and
Gender (1968) all the way back to Margaret Mead in the 1930s.7 But what social scientists
wrote about gender was conceived as the result of empirical, objective or neutral research.
On the contrary, the concept of gender as a term of social contestation was introduced and
articulated by feminists in many disciplines as part of the critique of Western patriarchy.8
4. Stuart Hal , Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 141; Gloria Wekker, ‘Building Nests in a Windy Place: Thinking about Gender and Ethnicity in the Netherlands,’ trans.
Gonny Pasaribu, in The Making of European Women’s Studies, vol. iv (Utrecht: Athena, November, 2002), p. 119.
5. This terse definition in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language telescopes the history of the word’s usage given in the oed ( Oxford English Dictionary), where the acceptation ‘sex’ is specified as figurative and documented from the seventeenth century.
6. The first major critical texts of the women’s movement, Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York, 1969), her doctoral dissertation in literature, and Shalamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York, 1970), dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir, had the word sex in their titles, as did de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex ( Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949), but intended it in the sense of gender and not of biological sex or of sexual acts.
7. See Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935).
8. Sherry Ortner and Harriet Whitehead pointed out ‘the bias that often underlies studies of both sex roles and male dominance –an assumption that we know what «men» and «women» are, an assumption that male and female are predominantly natural objects rather than predominantly cultural constructions.’ See Sherry B. Ortner & Harriet Whitehead, eds., Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 1.
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
Gender and its near-synonym «sexual difference» were the terms in which feminists
analyzed the sociosexual definition of woman as divergent from the universal standard that
was Man. In other words, gender was the mark of woman, the mark of a sexual difference that
entailed women’s subordinate status in society and a set of character traits correlated to their
anatomical or physiological constitution —traits such as a nurturing or caring disposition,
malleability, vanity… I do not need to go on, you know very well what I mean. Gender, as
feminists redefined it, was the sum of those traits, whether they were thought to have some
basis in nature or to be imposed by culture and social conditioning. In either case, gender
was the name of a social structure.
It was in that context, in the mid 1980s, that I proposed the idea of a «technology of
gender».9 It seemed to me that gender was not the simple derivation of anatomical/biological
sex but a sociocultural construction, a representation, or better, the compounded effect of
discursive and visual representations which, I saw emanating from various institutions —the
family, religion, the educational system, the media, medicine, or law— but also from less
obvious sources: language, art, literature, film, and so on. However, the constructedness
or discursive nature of gender does not prevent it from having real implications, or concrete
effects, both social and subjective, for the material life of individuals. On the contrary, the
reality of gender is precisely in the effects of its representation; gender is realized, becomes
«real» when that representation becomes a self-representation, is individually assumed as a
form of one’s social and subjective identity. In other words, gender is both an attribution and
an assumption: it attributed to me by others and it is assumed by me as my own.
We all know that, by now. But what I want to stress here is that the elaboration of the concept
gender occurred within feminist studies, well before the shift to what is now called gender
16
studies. I stress this because that history is already disappearing: in another decade or so,
perhaps no one will remember that the critical concept of gender, the idea that individuals are
actually constituted as a gendered subjects, did not exist before feminist theory named and
elaborated it as a new mode of knowledge, an epistemic practice arising in conjunction with
a radical, oppositional, political movement. Let me suggest, therefore, that the sexual identity
lesbian, or queer, or trans, also exist in a context of political opposition to discriminatory laws
and oppressive social practices.
Today, the study of gender covers a variety of issues that range from the more conservative,
such as the relations of women and men in the family or in the workplace, to the more
transgressive, such as gender crossing, drag, transvestism, and practices of body modification
—piercing, tattoing, scarification, body building, hormone intake, body-altering surgery— all
of which are seen as ways to deconstruct gender and to blur or dissolve the distinction
between what used to be called «the sexes».
A cursory view of the semiotics of gender over the years shows that the relation of gender to
sex has gone from contiguity to similarity, or from metonymy to metaphor. In the early feminist
studies of the sex-gender system, it was a syntagmatic relation on the axis of combination:
in those studies where gender is understood as culturally specific and constructed, whereas
9. See Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). For the Spanish translation of the first chapter, ‘La tecnología del género’, see Teresa de Lauretis, Diferencias: Etapas de un camino a través del feminismo, trans. María Echániz Sans (Madrid: Horas y Horas, 1999), pp. 33-69.
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
sex is assigned by nature, body and gender exist side by side, distinct though metonymically
related. More recently, where both gender and biological sex are considered discursive
constructions that are neither natural nor fixed for each individual, but can be resignified
in performance or surgically reassigned, the relation of gender and sex is a paradigmatic
relation on the axis of substitution; each can stand for the other. The word transgender goes
one step further: in alluding to, but eliding the sexual of transsexual, transgender bypasses sex altogether.10 It bears no reference to sex, sexuality, or the body — only to gender.
A stronger emphasis on gender identity rather than sexual identity is also indicated, at
least in the us, by the self-chosen identities of F to M transsexuals as transmen and of M
to Fs as transwomen. On the other hand, the word chosen by those who identify as simply
trans, without specification of sex or gender, suggests that the transformation is not the bodily
transformation from one anatomical/biological sex to another but the transformation into a
being who is beyond the two traditional genders (masculine and feminine), beyond the two
traditional sexes (male and female), and beyond the two allegedly traditional forms of sexual
organization (heterosexual and homosexual). The term trans, then, best conveys the idea
that personal identity is an ongoing process.
All of these terms, however, clearly privilege gender in relation to personal identity, even if
they do it by contesting, deconstructing or «resignifying» gender. Are they perhaps also ways
to actually ignore, downplay or avoid sexuality? What about the sexual, the properly sexual
dimension of the self? What is, exactly, sexuality?
SexualIty
17
I hope we can agree that sexuality is not just the anatomical form of the body or its
chromosonal or hormonal configuration; nor is it merely the reproductive function. The specific
dimension of human sexuality is the mental representation of objects of desire, including
one’s own body, and the imagining of scenes or fantasy scenarios in which the wish for
sexual pleasure or satisfaction may (or may not) be attained. The wish to have children, too,
when it occurs, is precisely a wish, a fantasy; it is not the mechanical or automatic compliance
with an instinct to reproduce but the expectation of attaining a special kind of love or other
gratifications, usually in the scenario of a family. It was Freud’s discovery —and his first
contribution to modern, 20th century epistemology— that the mind is not only able to imagine,
anticipate, or remember sexual pleasure, but it is also able to forget it, or more exactly, to
repress it; that is to say, to remove it from consciousness and yet retain it as a mnemic trace
(the trace of something we cannot remember) in the psychic dimension that he called the
unconscious. The sexual wish, in that case, is expelled from consciousness but it lives on in
the psyche as an unconscious fantasy, a phantasm.
Sexuality, then, or rather the sexual drive, is an affect, an excitation that is felt in the body
but is not merely of the body. It can be given a name and linked to an object —typically a
10. Bearing no reference to sex, sexuality, or the body – only to gender, this term effects the total projection of the axis of combination onto the axis of selection that, according to Roman Jakobson, characterizes self-referential, poetic language. And indeed the word transgender is a figure, a trope that fully realizes the nature of the signifier; that is to say, it is meaningful only as a sign, it signifies ‘I am a signifier.’
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
person, or better said, the mental image of a person— if the sexual wish is acceptable
to the ego, our conscious sense of self, and in particular to what Freud cal ed the moral
component of the ego: that is, the idea of self we acquire in growing up, starting with toilet
training and onward to adult personal hygiene, eating habits, ways of loving, and patterns of
interpersonal behavior (here gender is crucial: the rules of gender we have internalized are
very much part of our conscious sense of self and of our self-image). When a sexual wish is
not acceptable to the conscious ego, then the wish is repressed and remains unconscious,
inexpressible; but it may be felt in the body as a nameless affect, a yearning, a malaise, a
sense of dissatisfaction with ourselves and the world, or even as an urgency that makes us
do what we do not want to do.
If a repressed sexual wish continues to bother us, as Jean Laplanche put it, like a splinter
in the skin, it is because the human psyche is inextricably linked to a body with its specific and
singular history. The history of the body begins in early infancy. The sexual wishes expressed
or repressed, the pleasures enjoyed or forbidden, the satisfaction attained, postponed or
displaced, transferred elsewhere —al these constitute the history of our individual embodiment
over the years, but the greatest part of the repressed, the wishes we do not remember because
they have become unconscious occur during our infancy and childhood. This is Freud’s second
contribution to modern epistemology, the concept of infantile sexuality.
It is a commonplace that infantile sexuality develops in two successive stages, the oral
stage and the anal stage, which precede the development of the sexual organs and the
kicking-in of certain hormones at puberty. The commonplace implies that only the latter is
really sexuality, that is to say, adult sexuality is genital sexuality. But this popular view is
contradicted by obvious considerations: the infantile manifestations of sexual pleasure, oral
18
and anal, remain fully active in adult sexuality; moreover, these and other partial drives,
so-called, can actually be more powerful than genital activity, for example in what were
called the perversions and are now called paraphilias: fetishism, transvestism, pedophilia,
exhibitionism, voyeurism, masochism, and sadism. According to John Money, the term
paraphilias was adopted by dsm-iii, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American
Psychiatric Association, in 1980.
At the time of its founding in the late nineteenth century, sexology made its entry into the criminal justice
system by way of forensic psychiatry, notably under the aegis of Richard von Krafft-Ebing 1886-1931.
Forensic psychiatry borrowed the nomenclature of the law in classifying sexual offenders as sexual
deviants and sexual perverts. Forensic psychiatry also borrowed from the criminal code its official list of
the perversions. Eventual y, the term perversion and deviance would give way to paraphilia.11
Now, the term paraphilia may sound more neutral than perversion, but it still names
sexual behaviors that are considered abnormal. Lo normal is certainly not open to question
in criminal law or forensic psychiatry. And we may remember that John Money initiated
the clinical practice of treating intersexual infants, born with genital organs that medicine
considers «indetermined» —treating them with surgery or hormones in order to «normalize»
their bodies as either male or female.12
11. John Money, The Lovemap Guidebook: A Definitive Statement (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1999), p. 55.
12. See Beatriz Preciado, ‘Technologiquement votre’, Actes du colloque Epistémologies du genre: regards d’hier, points de vue d’auhourd’hui (Paris: Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, 23-24 juin 2005).
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
In a book titled The Lovemap Guidebook and ominously subtitled A Definitive Statement,
Money states that the 1994 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV)
mentions seven additional paraphilias, including telephone scatologia, zoophilia, necrophilia,
coprophilia, and urophilia. «Remarkably,» he comments, «rape is not included.» We may
conclude either that rape is not a perversion, and therefore it is not included, or that rape
is a perversion, and therefore it should be included. A remarkable example of «scientific
neutrality». But the point I want to make is that among the known sexual behaviors are several
that hark back to infantile pleasures and produce sexual satisfaction even independently of
genital activity.
Psychoanalysis, unlike psychiatry and psychology, is not about sexual normality, lo normal.
On the contrary, for Freud, sexuality is the most complex and pervasive dimension of human
life, ranging from perversion to neurosis to sublimation; it is compulsive, non-contingent,
and incurable. It consists of intangible wishes and fantasies, some of which are conscious,
but others are completely unconscious and manifest as inexpressible feelings or nameless
affects. These, as I said, are variously felt and acted out in the body, including as symptoms,
but are not merely of the body. Where does sexuality come from? In his original and brilliant
reading of Freud, Jean Laplanche has argued that sexuality is not innate, inherent in the
physical body ab origine, but is ‘implanted’ in the infant —a body without language ( infans)
and initially without an ego— by the necessary actions of maternal care, feeding, cleaning,
holding, and so on. A sense of well-being, comfort and pleasure are produced in the infant by
the flow of warm milk in the mouth, tongue and palate, and by the stimulation of the skin and
the entire surface of the body, especially its orifices —what will become the erogenous zones.
You may be familiar with Freud’s famous observation that:
19
No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed
cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture [is the] prototype of the expre-
ssion of sexual satisfaction in later life.13
However, with the development of the ego, the polymorphous pleasures of the infant’s
body (the enjoyment of defecating, for example) will be subjected to rules of self-control
(toilet training), and what was a physical pleasure becomes a disgusting or shameful thing
to the conscious ego —but not necessarily so to the unconscious part of the ego: repressed
infantile sexual wishes and the trace of bodily excitations live on at the unconscious level.
Gender, on the other hand, is a manifestation of the conscious ego. Although it, too, comes
from the other, it is not exactly implanted in the physical infant body as is sexuality, but rather is assigned by parents and/or medical practitioners even before birth. In fact, both the
assignment of gender by others and the child’s identification with a gender —as a girl or as a
boy, since no other alternative is offered in childhood— often precede the child’s awareness
of anatomical differences.
13. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory on Sexuality, trans. and revised by James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 48.
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
SexualIty and Gender
Laplanche is the only theorist of psychoanalysis I know of who has addressed the issue
of gender. He argues that, unlike the implantation of sexuality, gender assignment occurs on
the basis of sexual anatomy, or rather, of the adult’s perception of it, which in turn is based
on the visibility of the external genital organ. It is for this reason that the category of gender,
like the category of sex, falls under the binary logic of the phallus —either with or without
the penis, either male or female. Noting the tendency in current usage to speak of gender
identity rather than sexual identity, Laplanche suggests that the displacement of the question
of sexual identity onto that of gender identity may be a mark of repression ( refoulement): the
repression of the perverse, polymorphous, and unconscious dimensions of sexuality studied
by Freud, and its displacement onto gender as a category more acceptable to the adult’s self-
understanding. Still today, Laplanche writes, «what is most difficult [for adults] to accept are,
as one says, «bad habits»14 (think of Almodovar’s pun, La mala educación). The category
of gender, with its «empirical» genital bias, falls under the phallic logic of castration, either
phallic or castrated, either masculine or feminine. But he goes further: «What sex and its
secular arm, one could say, the castration complex, tend to repress is infantile sexuality»,
writes Laplanche with biting irony; sex-gender and the castration complex, he says, repress
the sexuality that is the crucial discovery of psychoanalysis: perverse, polymorphous, infantile
sexuality, which is oral, anal, para-genital and upstream of sex and gender differences.15 In
other words, those infamous psychoanalytic notions —castration and the Oedipus complex—
are not the enemies but the allies of gender; they are instrumental in constructing gender as
traditionally conceived through repression and identification with the parental figures. Let me
20
put it this way: the trouble with gender is sexuality; what troubles gender identity is the kink in
sex —the perverse, the infantile, the shameful, the disgusting, the «sick», the destructive and
the self-destructive elements that personal identity seldom avows and the political discourse
on gender must elide altogether.
You may object that this view of sexuality is psychoanalytic —and of course it is. But
if I asked you to name the originators of the modern conception of sexuality, you would
probably say Freud and Foucault. And I would agree. I argued elsewhere that these two
theories of sexuality are not in contradiction with one another but actually complementary:
while the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality describes the discursive practices and
institutional mechanisms that implant sexuality in the social subject, Freudian psychoanalytic
14. ‘Je crois que, même de nos jours, la sexualité infantile proprement dite est ce qui répugne le plus à la vision de l’adulte.
Encore aujourd’hui, le plus difficilement accepté, ce sont le «mauvaises habitudes», comme on dit.’ (J. Laplanche, ‘Le genre, le sexe, le sexual,’ in André Green et al., Sur la théorie de la séduction (Paris: In Press Éditions, 2003), p. 72.
15. ‘Ce que le sexe et son bras séculier, pourrait-on-dire, le complexe de castration, tend à refouler, c’est le sexuel infantil’
(J. Laplanche, ‘Le genre, le sexe, le sexual,’ p. 86). To mark the distinction, Laplanche coins the French neologism ‘le sexual’ from the German word Freud uses for sexuality in contradistinction to Geschlecht (sex/gender): ‘Il ya bien sûr Geschlecht qui veut dire le “sexe sexué” mais il y a aussi le sexuel ou le “sexual”…. Il aurait été impensable que Freud intitulât son ouvrage inaugural: Trois essais sur la théorie du sexué – ou de la sexuation. La Sexualtheorie n’est pas une Geschlechtstheorie... Le “sexual” est donc extérieur sinon même prealable pour Freud à la différence des sexes, voire à la différence des genres: il est oral, anal ou para-genital’ (pp. 70-71).
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
theory describes the subjective mechanisms through which the implantation takes, as it were,
producing the subject as a sexual subject. Incidentally, neither Freud nor Foucault had much
to say about gender. I will not repeat my argument here, since it’s already published, but I will
mention an interesting coincidence.16
Laplanche’s theory of primal seduction maintains that sexuality is «implanted» in the
infant by the actions, the conscious investments , and the unconscious fantasies of parents
or adult caretakers. This theory was first sketched out in Laplanche’s acclaimed book Life
and Death in Psychoanalysis, published in 1970. Six years later, Foucault used the same
metaphor, implantation, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, La volonté de savoir (1976). He wrote of the «multiple implantation of ‘perversions» in the social body by means
of the institutional (medical, legal, pedagogical) regulation of sexual practices. «The perverse
implantation», for Foucault, was aimed at population control and the management of bio-
power; very similarly, for Laplanche, the «implantation of adult sexuality» in the baby is aimed
at the affective and social management of the individual child.17 The figure of implantation
works in parallel ways in both texts and in both theories.
Implantation is a trope, a figure of speech that retains the etymological connotation of
planting, inserting something into a soil, a depth, in common usage as well as in the medical
acceptation of introducing something under the skin —precisely, an implant. The French
dictionary Petit Robert gives as an antonym déraciner, to uproot; Laplanche speaks of the
repressed memory of sexual trauma as of something «internal-external» like «a spine in
the flesh… a veritable spine in the protective wall of the ego»;18 and with a similar metaphor
Frantz Fanon, the Francophone Martinican psychiatrist who worked for the independence of
Algeria, describes the racist imposition of «a racial epidermal schema» onto the black man’s
21
body: «the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in
which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye.»19
Body
In his first, autobiographic book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon describes how
the racial epidermal schema is superimposed onto the corporeal, phenomenal schema
that is the source of bodily sensations and comes to displace it altogether. In this way the
black subject’s perception, subjectivity, and experience are at the same time constituted
and rendered incoherent by two incompatible «frames of reference» (p. 110). In the black
subject’s lived experience, then, the displacement of the corporeal schema by the racial
16. See Teresa de Lauretis, ‘The Stubborn Drive,’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 4 (Summer 1998), pp. 851-877.
17. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. with an introduction by Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 46; Vie et mort en psychanalyse (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), p. 75. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, 36-37; La volonté de savoir, pp. 50-51.
18. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 42; Vie et mort en psychanalyse, 70.
19. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), pp. 111-112; ‘l’autre, par gestes, attitudes, regards, me fixe, dans le sens où l’on fixe une préparation par un colorant,’ in Frantz Fanon, Peau noir, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1995 [1952]), pp. 88-90.
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
epidermal schema causes the body —and the embodied ego— to be continually fractured,
time and again denied and re-asserted, in a traumatic, ongoing process of dislocation and
symptomatization.20
It is in this awareness of the excessive and irreducible materiality of the body that Fanon
can teach all of us —feminist, lesbian, gay, transgender, transsexual, intersex, and variously
paraphilic queers. I do not want to imply or suggest that Fanon’s lived experience of the colonial
subject’s racially inscribed body can be translated into or compared to the perception that
other subjects, differently positioned in the geopolitical and social space, have of their bodies.
What I want to emphasize in Fanon’s text is a theoretical point, namely, that the corporeality of
the body — the body as it feels— is experientially distinct, if inextricable, from the body image
and the discursive construction of the body that are culturally imposed, one way or another,
on each social subject. For example, Fanon’s sense of «corporeal malediction,» as he calls
it, the «certain uncertainty» that surrounds his perception of his «physiological self» (pp. 110-
111), returns in the narratives of transsexuals and the critical studies on transsexuality, such
as Jay Prosser’s Second Skins and Gesa Lindemann’s Das Paradoxe Geschlecht.
I also find it in the clinical case histories and personal accounts of individuals with Body
Integrity Identity Disorder (biid); individuals whose psychic image of their bodies demands
the amputation of one or more healthy limbs, legs or arms, for only with an amputated or
‘abbreviated’ body can they feel «normal», as they say, or «whole».21 Paradoxical as it may
seem to others, their conscious perception of bodily integrity is documented in self-narratives
and case histories, witnessed in documentary films like the one entitled, exactly, Whole (dir.
Melody Gilbert, 2003), and the dozens of web sites devoted to information and support for
persons with biid, as well as amputee pornography; one such site «boasts a membership
22
of at least 1,400 subscribers».22 Here the relation of sexuality to the embodied ego is most
explicit, for in these individuals sexual arousal and satisfaction are said to be possible only in
relation to disabled bodies —their own (apotemnophilia) or other people’s (acrotomophilia)—
and with the use of wheelchairs, crutches, braces or other medical equipment evoking or
accompanying amputation.
At a time when Gay marriages seem to be a radical form of social protest; when television
sit-coms vie with one another in normalizing queer (as in ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’) and
speaking «The L Word»; when commercial films make sadomasochism almost respectable
(as in Maîtresse, The Secretary, The Piano Teacher), these less palatable paraphilias are typically confined to the sites sprawling in the dark entrails of the web. But at least one film,
Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), based on the eponymous novel by J. J. Ballard (1973), suggests
that the eroticization of traffic accidents is a way to deal with unmanageable experiences of
bodily trauma that turn into traumatic psychic events, and the compulsion to repeat them in
crescendo lends some evidence to the sexual nature of the death drive itself.
20. For a longer discussion of Fanon’s book, see my article ‘Difference Embodied: Reflections on Black Skin, White Masks’, Parallax, vol. 8, no. 2 (2002): pp. 54-68.
21. See John Money and Kent W. Sirncoe, ‘Acrotomophilia, Sex and Disability: New Concepts and Case Report, http://
home.t-online.de/home/Arnelo-Forum/hintergrund/theorie2/money.htm, 2/28/2004.
22. http://www.overground.be/article.php?code=66&lan=en. Printed on 2/27/2004 from the Web site «OverGround, dedicated to providing support and information for those of us who are attracted to others with disabilities.» I owe al biid information to the extensive research of Timothy Koths, a doctoral student in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz.
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
I take from Fanon the suggestion that the body image, whatever its particular configuration,
is the overdetermined internalization of some external imposition. Like sexuality, the body
image is the psychic inscription of what is first an implantation in the body. Sexuality, I said, is implanted in every human body by the necessity of parental care, but other kinds of implants,
prosthetic or cosmetic, also produce psychic inscriptions; as Beatriz Preciado elegantly puts
it, somatic implants are also fantasmatic implants —they correlate to a fantasy of the body.23
Today, in light of the massive growth of body-altering surgery, there is the possibility of
intervening politically and personally in the construction of the body, and hence of gender and
body image.24 Can this effectively alter the binary logic of gender? I leave the question open
and only add a cautionary remark: in reconstructing identities, let us not ignore the stubborn
demands of the body sexual; let us not think that gender is simply what I want it to be. What
technology makes available, if you permit me an oldfashioned metaphor, is always a double-
edged sword.
23
23. See note 12 above.
24. These technologies of the body are quite a different thing from what Foucault proposed as ‘technologies of the self’.
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
SOBRE LAS DISCONTINUIDADES SEXO - GÉNERO - DESEO
EN EL ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO
ERNEST ALCOBA
INTRODUCCIÓN
LA CUESTIÓN DE LA IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO constituye un campo de refl exión importante en el
Arte contemporáneo. En absoluto se trata de exigirle al arte que siempre tenga una co-
herencia ideológica o política, o que proponga una visión de la realidad socialmente factible.
Pero el arte no es un fenómeno aislado del mundo. Cuando desde hace unos años se ha
tematizado la cuestión de la identidad sexual y de género en el arte, éste ha encontrado en
lo identitario un campo fructífero de signifi cación y experiencia.
Las propuestas artísticas actuales contribuyen a la transformación de la mirada, incorpo-
rando nuevos factores de sensación, experiencia, comprensión, recepción. Estas caracterís-
ticas a menudo chocan con la opinión pública, oposición que puede constituir un revulsivo
social y que muestra que lo que persigue el arte es una reacción de los/as receptores/as no
siempre relacionada con la contemplación de la belleza. En el arte actual, el movimiento del
espectador es protagonista, estimulado a través del contraste entre la norma y la excepción,
lo previsible y lo insólito, la belleza y la fealdad, la seriedad y el humor, la literalidad y la
24
ironía, el cientifi smo y la magia, la construcción y la destrucción, la conformación y la diso-
lución, la autoridad y la impostura, la utilidad y la inutilidad, lo cotidiano y lo excepcional…
Percibiendo la debilidad, se acaba todo absolutismo. No es este el momento de plantear las
ambivalentes relaciones del arte con la esfera pública, ni el rechazo actual a una concepción
estética ilustrada, refl exiones que ya hemos iniciado en otros lugares. Entre las polaridades
hoy debilitadas, encontramos las categorías sexuales de los individuos (se ha puesto en
crisis un concepto biológico de mujer y hombre), de género (conformado a partir de idea-
les construidos social y culturalmente) e incluso de deseo (nuevas visiones de la subjetivi-
dad). Muchas propuestas se dirigen a desvanecer cualquier continuidad entre sexo, género
y deseo, alterando la percepción que los/as espectadores/as mantienen sobre sí mismos/as
como seres sexuales y sexuados en un contexto social.
Tratar la cuestión de la identidad sexual y de género a través del arte no es un ejercicio
banal. Cuando el arte ha trabajado con la defi nición, ampliación y disolución de los lími-
tes de las identidades sexuales y de género, también ha contribuido a dar forma a nuevas
posiciones vitales emergentes, que han fracturado visiones hegemónicas y han coincidido
con formas de sentir el cuerpo, el deseo y la identidad antes desconocidas. Muchas obras
han reproducido sin más inercias patriarcales ni siquiera cuestionadas, otras han producido
efectos transformadores cuestionando el sexismo, refl ejando la viabilidad de realidades más
igualitarias, dando visibilidad a nuevas formas de sentir el propio cuerpo y el propio deseo
que habían sido perseguidas o que simplemente habían pasado desapercibidas. El arte
puede arrojar luz sobre ciertas problemáticas de género en un momento como el actual, en
IDENTIDAD DE GÉNERO VS. IDENTIDAD SEXUAL
el que la cuestión de la identidad encuentra en la representación, y el reconocimiento sub-
yacente, su manifestación y socialización.
A continuación realizaremos un recorrido por las tensiones crecientes entre sexo, género
y deseo en el arte contemporáneo, para abordar cuestiones sobre la identidad que retoma-
remos en la propuesta fi nal. Antes, debemos realizar una puntualización. En algunos textos
se acusa un cierto reduccionismo, al intentar encajar las obras en abstrusos discursos de
crítica cultural, fi losofía, psicología… como si existiera una total adscripción de una serie de
artistas a una determinada tendencia, sin más. De ahí que, siguiendo a Eco (Eco, 1991),
debamos diferenciar la interpretación y el uso de una obra. La interpretación persigue el
respeto a las intenciones del autor, a su época y a la variable independiente de la propia
obra ( intentio operis). Con ello, una recepción fi el prioriza ciertas respuestas en torno a un
nódulo de sentidos defi nido con la ayuda de disciplinas como la historia del arte, la estética,
la crítica... El uso, en cambio, fuerza el arco de plausibilidad de la interpretación para hace
prevalecer un aspecto de la obra sobre los demás, con el objetivo de ilustrar un discurso
decidido más allá de la intención del artista. En aras de dicha plausibilidad, podemos afi rmar
que no todas las interpretaciones son usos. Una obra puede ser vista como exponente de
una determinada imagen de la mujer y ser inscrita en un discurso feminista, pero no pode-
mos esperar que se agote en ese discurso, ni que articule las ideas de la misma manera
que un ensayo. Así, nosotros usaremos las obras siendo lo más fi eles posible a la intentio
autoris, pero nos centraremos exclusivamente en aquellos aspectos que ilustran el debate
que nos interesa.
25
LA DOBLE VALENCIA DE LA IDENTIDAD
En las sociedades avanzadas es evidente que existe una cierta libertad para elegir entre
una multiplicidad de estilos de vida entorno a la identidad sexual (Giddens, 2000: 24) a través
de pautas de comportamiento, circuitos sociales de expresión, reconocimiento, interacción
y acción. No es exagerado decir que muchos de esos logros se han conseguido a través de
políticas de identidad de muy diverso tipo, entre ellas las relacionadas con el género.
Las políticas identitarias de las sociedades avanzadas han mostrado su utilidad en cuan-
to a la reivindicación social, y la transformación de diversas formas de opresión. La identidad
(sexual, de género, étnica, de clase…) ha permitido que un colectivo se identifi que como tal,
que defi na mejor sus intereses y los límites de los mismos, que sus acciones sean interpre-
tadas dentro de un espectro de posibilidades, que se coordinen para ahorrar o multiplicar
esfuerzos y, en defi nitiva, que una determinada comunidad de intereses (identidad) sea
reconocida en su dignidad y en su derecho, a través de políticas y prácticas. Basta aludir a
las mejoras de las políticas de género que afectan a la mujer, la legalidad de la familia homo-
sexual, etc., aunque aún queda mucho camino por recorrer. Por otra parte, no es menos cier-
to que las políticas de identidad también se han concretado en prácticas demasiado rígidas,
prescriptivas sobre cómo deben manifestarse y experimentarse determinadas identidades
de género, reduciendo la amplitud y complejidad del sentimiento y el deseo.
Lo verdaderamente importante para nosotros no es tanto establecer una genealogía de la