‘[D]ifferent even from our “own” differences’: Racial Signification and the Legacy of Lacanian Sexuation
‘[D]ifferent even from our “own” differences’: Racial Signification and the Legacy of Lacanian Sexuation

Summary/Abstract: Jacques Lacan concluded his 20th seminar in 1973, seven years after the publication of Écrits and the notorious Johns Hopkins conference that would become The Structuralist Controversy. Yet, in our contemporary moment, American academics still struggle to contend with the implications of what Lacan brought to the United States in 1966 and spoke to crowds of Parisian students in 1973. Strains of academic philosophy, such as those of Rebecca Tuvel, present a crude parity between race and gender that Lacanian theory contradicts. Theorists like Jane Gallop, Joan Copjec, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, and Antonio Viego have done crucial work in using Lacan to address questions of race and gender. Lacan argues that sex is determined by one’s relation to jouissance and the Symbolic Order rather than biology or social construction. Furthermore, I will continue in the tradition of Seshadri-Crooks and Viego to distinguish between the psychic structures of sex and race. I will also dispute the claims of Tuvel’s ‘In Defense of Transracialism’ (2017) from a Lacanian perspective and in doing so demonstrate the usefulness of Lacan in disciplines such as gender studies and critical race theory.

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