ABSTRACT
In his lifelong dedication to the scientific study of gender and sexuality, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller (1925-1991) wrote nine books, coauthored three and published more than 100 articles. Stoller originally trained at Stanford Medical School, CA and Columbia University, NY. He worked at the Medical School of the University of California, Los Angeles and helped start the UCLA Gender Identity Clinic. Between 1959 and 1990, Stoller conducted numerous case-studies, first on intersexualized and then on transsexual(ized) people. In this chapter I will interrogate ten of his publications between 1959 and 1985 in which he continuously developed the concept of ‘core gender identity.’ In his first article on “The Intersexed Patient” from 1959, Stoller still used the concept ‘sexual identity,’ he later replaced it by ‘gender identity’ and then finally by ‘core gender identity.’ During the 30 or so years of his research career, Stoller proposes three components in the development of gender identity: the bodily ego, the parent-infantrelationship, and a biological force. In the course of this chapter I will work my way backwards through these three components starting with the biological force and ending with the bodily ego. Looking closely at how Stoller re-defined and re-worked each of them throughout the years, I interrogate the implications for intersexualization. For example, Stoller first proposed a ‘biological force’ as being responsible for ‘gender identity’ but during the years he more or less lost interest in it due to several reasons. In the publications under investigation he also frequently refers to Freudian concepts such as castration anxiety, penis envy, and the Oedipus complex-all of them serve to different degrees and at different times in the development of the concept of ‘core gender identity.’ These classical psychoanalytical explanatory frameworks are mainly supporting the component of the parent-infant relationship. Major parts of this argument are used by Stoller in determining whether a child is naturally crossing gender boundaries-as in the case of intersex-or pathologically-as in the case of transsexuality. The concept bodily ego will be used to establish a third hermaphroditic gender identity albeit only to dismiss it and reduce gender identity again to the binary. Stoller’s book on Sex and Gender from 1968 was crucial for feminism, since the gender-concept has been derived from this book and been introduced to
feminist theory by sociologist Ann Oakley in Sex, Gender and Society (1972). Stoller, in Sex and Gender bases his theories on 85 patients and 63 members of their families whom he either evaluated psychiatrically or subjected them to classical psychoanalysis in the course of the ten years before 1968 (Stoller 1968b: ix). However, the works I will analyze in this chapter are more or less based on not more than 5-10 cases, which he repeatedly draws upon to feed his arguments. Stoller himself describes his approach as having meandered, focusing first on “intersexed, then transsexuals, then those with gender perversions, then the parents of children with gender disorders and, impending, the perversions at large” (xvi). Even though he emphasizes that he focuses on gender identity and processes rather than sexuality, his research is always infused with statements on sexuality, sexual orientation, and preferences (as we call it now). Stoller’s investigation and investment into intersexualization will be questioned mainly by use of current critical work by feminist scholars but also by a close-reading of his publications that is focused on intrinsic contradictions and underlying biases and assumptions. The most interesting feature of Stoller’s work for me, however, is one of the byproducts of ‘core gender identity:’ a hermaphroditic identity. In the course of establishing his theories on a threefold gender identity he also displayed a masculinist agenda trying to prove that masculinity is an achievement and femininity a rather negligible aspect in the development of the human psyche. Whereas also performing a limiting and limited reading of Freudian theories, Stoller tried to accommodate his own findings in a psychoanalytical framework and thereby produced a fundamental worshipping of masculinity. In the course of his research years, Stoller started of with a very cautious stance concerning the treatment of intersex* people-towards the end of his career he echoed Money’s emergency paradigm.
