ABSTRACT
A number of theoretical distortions follow from the displacement of psychoanalytic terminology into a more familiar framework. Consider the term “sexual difference,” which so often appears in French psychoanalytic literature. Current discussions of psychoanalysis are largely organized by the distinction between “sex” and “gender.”10 This distinction has been very useful in allowing us to separate the biological aspects of sex from the historical conventions governing gender. In perfect keeping with this conceptual arrangement, one finds numerous books that offer to explain the difference between the sexes on biological grounds (Simon Levay’s The Sexual Brain, for example, or the more popular Brain Sex), while others insist upon the contingency of human conventions, including conventions of knowledge about sex (Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex, for example, or John Winkler’s The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece).11 And yet, on the basis of this alternative between biology and culture, the very terminology of psychoanalysis is dropped, and readers are forced to decide whether the term “sexual difference” refers to biological matters (sex), to social effects (gender), or to some obscure combination of both.
