ABSTRACT
Gender identity still tends to be stereotyped and polarized as “masculine” or “feminine,” in spite of great efforts in the contemporary scene within the social sciences, the humanities and psychoanalysis, to render the construct in a less or nonbinary fashion 1 (see for a scholarly overview of the literature, Gyler, 2010). Conceptual turmoil and confusions abound, and individuals in differing fields write with differing definitions of the related phenomena. “Masculine” and “feminine” to me are adjectives that refer to mentalized qualities. They are related, but not equivalent to “male” and “female,” which refer to sexed body morphology. A way out of the confusion in thinking about gender is to conceptualize a gender spectrum from an unattainable (and obviously mentally unhealthy) “pure masculinity” at one end, to an equally unattainable “pure femininity” at the other, and to focus clinically on the lived span in between. This is one way out of the rigidity of the binary trap of categorizing us as either masculine or feminine. This is not the only way, as attested to by the many scholars and academicians who are struggling with these confusions, and who prefer to conceptualize former binary conflicts as paradoxes and contingencies and look for shared interstitial space in “thirds” (see Kulish, 2010 , for a succinct overview of the struggles and proposed solutions). Jessica Benjamin (in Dimen and Harris, 2001) shares working thoughts on the conceptual problems; for example, in her struggle with how to tackle gender polarities as she seeks “… what might be rediscovered beyond the dominance of the active–passive complementarity … to formulate a different kind of complementarity than the one that emerges at the oedipal level, that of have or have not, phallus or no phallus (Birksted-Breen, 1996) … true activity does not take the defensive form of repudiating passivity. Activity predicated on the activity–passivity split, directed toward the passive object, is merely action; it lacks the intersubjective space of the potential other” (p. 59).
