The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era

Eight: Transgendered Freud

108 Chapter Eight Transgendered Freud in speaking of identity as biocultural, i want to emphasize the link between body, mind, and culture. among the newest identities coming into social consciousness are ones related to transgender, and the roots of that identity both go deep into history and culture and yet seem relatively new. one place people have rarely looked to find origins is in the work of freud, who seemed, perhaps until recently, to be not the founder of sexual identities but the confounder. in this essay, i want to try to reclaim freud by thinking of him as a daring and early advocate of a gender continuum. in 1876 freud began his career when he was nineteen by dissecting eels to try to find the male gonad. it was a difficult task and ended in failure. freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm fleiss, saying,“i obtain sharks, rays, eels and other creatures, which i investigate first from the general anatomical viewpoint and thereafter with regard to one particular problem.” The problem was “since time immemorial, only the female [eel] has been recognized ; even aristotle did not know where the male of the species was.” freud chose to explore this seeming transgender animal that was possibly hermaprohodite, possibly a parthenogenetic example of how females could reproduce without males. he went on to say, “one does not know which is male and which is female when the animal does not possess external sexual differences.” he notes that if you can’t find gonads and you can’t find secondary sex characteristics, then you won’t be able to figure out which eel is male or female “since eels do not keep diaries.” but freud ended up failing in his attempts: “now i am toiling to rediscover this eel, this male eel; but in vain, all the eels i cut open are of the fairer sex.” To this comment he adds a drawing of a somewhat demure and fetching female eel (see fig. 1). Transgendered Freud • 109 freud is obviously trying to establish traditional reproductive categories on this seemingly aberrant eel.1 That freud should have begun his career this way is too good a gift for a biocultural critic to pass up. The obvious insight is that the eel, itself a kind of phallic symbol, was paradoxically only known to be female. The young freud obviously took to eels with a certain fascination and began to gender them in anthropomorphic ways, as his drawing shows. yet even as he draws a female eel, he wants to anatomize it and find a male sexual organ within it. he is hoping that the female eel will yield a testicle rather than an ovary. This anatomizing of the eel’s body is significant in a number of ways. sander gilman and others have shown how during freud’s era, Jews were considered feminized compared with other europeans. complex issues around racial categories and circumcision led the Jewish man’s body to contain both a masculine and a feminine element—masculine because the circumcised penis is the hidden identifier of Jewish maleness and feminine because the penis is altered or even castrated, vulnerable, and diminished. gilman points to freud’s attempt to find the inner male in the outwardly female eel as part of his Jewish self-analysis.2 The eel analogy is furthered because Jews and romas were apparently compared to eels, who wander through the oceans of the world as these ethnic groups were thought to wander the planet. freud’s failure to find the male gonad in the eel caused him to reassess the whole notion of a fixed biological determinism and propelled him from biology to the psyche. in this new course of study, freud’s notions of gender deemphasized the purely physical genitals and emphasized their meanings, signification, and import to the individual. in this sense, he was engaging in a kind of early transbiology, which according to sarah franklin includes the notion of the cultural meanings inherent in the “facts” of biology .3 rather than stressing a genetic inheritance, freud elaborated a series of developmental instances from infant to child to adult that would nomifig . 1 110 • THE END OF NORMAL nate one’s sexual orientation and gender identity, rather than some biological fixity, a hard-to-find or elusive gonad hidden in the recesses of the body. an essential part of freud’s new theory of...