Review - Assuming a Body
Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality
by Gayle Salamon
Columbia University Press, 2010
Review by Maria Lakka, Ph.D.
Mar 20th 2012 (Volume 16, Issue 12)
http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=6454&cn=400The book addresses the theoretical, ethical and political dimensions of ->-bleeped-<-, which the author defends by challenging first and foremost the conception of the (sexed) body as a given. She insists on the social construction of the body through experience and language and repeatedly argues against different accounts of a material body whether in the form of a biological determination or in that of a materiality that precedes and exceeds language. However, she does not reject materiality altogether but suggests that we need to affirm a body's materiality not as a non-discursive fact but through the articulation of a new relationship between materiality and discourse.
In the first chapter Salomon presents different psychoanalytic accounts of the formation of the bodily ego. She begins with Freud's discussion of hermaphroditism, as the originary condition of intersexuality from which the unisexual physical disposition evolutionary emerged. Freud was tempted by the hypothesis of the intersexual body making possible a universal "bisexual psychical disposition" but his conclusion maintained the independency of the somatic and psychic registers. However, he recognized that a single resolution to each register was not necessary and that admixture and tension of both masculine and feminine traits could be maintained. Moreover, the Freudian body is fractured at an even deeper level and erotogenic zones are not restricted to the genitals but any part could take up such a function what points to the plasticity of erotogenicity and undermines the "indexical relation between genitals and sex".
