Are we pathologizing yet? Lacan's structures of desire: Neurosis, Perversion, Psychosis

I know that this is going to be an issue I'll be forced to navigate, probably more than once, as I'm hoping I'll be able to argue the case that psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanian articulations of it, have something useful to offer for thinking about trans subjectivity and embodiment (and about human subjectivity and embodiment more generally). That larger argument is likely not to take on much shape for some months to come, and may take years.      Who knows? 

Talkin' about my d-d-d-dissertation. 

But, given the justifiable intensity of negative responses on the part of trans people to the pathologizing discourses of psychiatry, medicine, and yes, that highly suspect brand of "psychoanalysis" which has become part of the ideological psychiatric state apparatus,.. psychodiagnostics might well be a hard sell. My basic contentions in regard to the psychic situation of trans people feel to me like they ought be utterly noncontroversial, even banal. Here are two of them (maybe all of them, actually);

* There is absolutely nothing inherently "dysfunctional" or "pathological" about being a trans person. Which is not to say that a trans person can't be bat shit crazy, just as, in principle, anybody can be bat shit crazy (I'm thinking of a GSU prof in the music department for example). 

* Psychoanalysts who would wish to claim that all trans people conform to any specific structure of desire (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) are being very bad analysts. Just as not every person with bleach blond hair is going to be "conservative", nor is every person with a hairlip going to be "shy" nor is everyone who has had braces going to be "promiscuous". Every person's inhabitation of a structure of desire will be unique, even if those structures qua structures are of a somewhat limited number (neurosis, perversion, psychosis - with the subtypes; hysteria, obsession, paranoia…. sometimes phobia, sort of). I would argue that, if anyone, claiming to speak with analytic authority (already a dubious notion) insists that all of any possible demographic set of people are going to share a single configuration with regard to their desire, that this cannot be anything other than an imaginarization of that "analyst", an elaboration of their own fantasmatic investments in their object of study (those folks they are charged with helping). Certainly these same analysts would be up in arms about my failure to appreciate the uniqueness and specificity of each subject were I to suggest that all heterosexuals or all men were perverts, psychotics or any one structure. 

Weirdly though (sadly, depressingly) there is lot of both of these things going on in the psychoanalytic lit on trans, giving the banalities stated above something of a radical character. Weird, huh? (not that there are any psychoanalysts listening) The commonest reference points are psychosis and hysteria, but I have also seen perversion and phobia suggested. The very plurality of these claims ought to raise some suspicions even before evaluating them. Applied as such, this very much deserves the name of pathologization and it is against the spirit of psychoanalytic thought as I understand it, in that psychoanalysis is not an agent of normalization. If it is used as such, it becomes something else, something other than psychoanalysis (for me at least, we can argue it elsewhere).

But this is where it also gets complicated and fraught for a number of reasons and reasons which ought not be swept under the rug. 

Before thinking about what might be problematic about the following psychodiagnostic categories, I'm going to try to give a brief overview of what I take the Lacanian position about structures of desire to be.  I'll be speaking out of the bag here, not running about like a good grad student and looking for other people who have said similar things to convince you that I am not wrong. How bout you decide?

The different structures of desire are all responses to the impossibility, once we have become speaking beings, of signification ever equalling being. Or we might think of this as a response to language's inability to capture being. There are thus three basic responses to this impossibility and the discomfort/suffering, etc that it imposes. We can deny it and construct any number of fantasies which resituate it not as forever lost (as it is) but as having been stolen, or mislaid, or forbidden or whatever. That would be the neurotic response. Or we can disavow that this happened, a sort of "I know it is lost but it isn't really lost" claim which allows that the subject can be the object, or control the object. This is the perverse response. Or, finally, one can foreclose. That is, one can rule out in advance that there could ever be any signification or even recognition of the loss of being that language entails. The response, in essence, forecloses the Symbolic by means of reducing it to the Imaginary. This is the psychotic response. 

While Freud and certain other analysts have speculated or even insisted that analysis is irrelevant to those with a perverse or psychotic structure, Lacan disagrees. At issue is simply that 99% of what we think of as analytic technique is actually more accurately described as "the technique of the clinic of neurosis". I saw it suggested that to proceed with a psychotic's analysis as if they were a neurotic could in fact be actively detrimental to them. 

Now, a few more points to remember when thinking about psychodiagnostics and lacanian nosological categories.

1. For Lacan there is no "normal" space to occupy. In fact normality as a concept, reference point or standard is absent from Lacan's theory.

2. To be a subject of desire is not a "pathology" because there is no normal against which one would have to judge to say that this or that sort of desiring structure was a deviation and hence, pathological.

3. To be a neurotic does not require that incessant and endless doubts a la Woody Allen (but without the humor) be manifested at the level of someone's everyday behavior. To be a pervert does not require that this subject have anything at all to do with fetishism or any of the sexual practices that we mark as perverse in the vernacular. To be a psychotic does not require that this subject is a raving looney, speaking in nothing but inscrutable babble and unable to make use of logic or reasoning, ever. 

No, the donut is not a fetish.

i. Neurosis is said to be the most common structure. It's central anxiety, that which it doubts most, appears in the form of a question and this question is said to vary whether one is hysteric or obsessional. The hysteric wonders "am I a man or a woman?" and desires to know just what being this or that means (thus we see the denial I mentioned above, the neurotic persists in denying that being can be captured in words). The obsessional asks "am I alive or am I dead?" which is again a question which demands that life (read: being) be given a definitive meaning (i.e., made dead, like the letter). 

ii. Perversion is marked by a kind of certainty (of course it isn't, but IT IS nonetheless) and this certainty is about the object. The pervert knows that they are the object of the Other's jouissance. Cops, judges, military - these are prime perverse life paths as they afford endless opportunities to be the instrument of the big Other's (largely painfully exacted) enjoyment. "Of course I know that I am not the agent of the Other's jouissance, but feel how much the Other enjoys when I punish the lawbreakers!"

Hi, I'm feeling both ordinary
& a wee bit psychotic

iii. Psychosis too has a sort of certainty involved, though it is different in character I think. To play it out in an impossible monologue, we might imagine it like this; "No object can be lost." But when we speak of psychosis as well as the word "psychotic," in the popular mind, this means raving psychopath or serial killer or some such thing. This is not what it means to Lacan. I've long wondered about the psychic state of the psychotic who has not had a dramatic "psychotic break". I understand that J-A.Miller and perhaps others have written some about this under the heading "ordinary psychosis" but I have not read any of this work. Suffice to say that most psychotic subjects are not in a psychotic break at all times, rather contingent factors in their may lives provoke such an event by undermining the master signifiers that allow psychotic subjects to operate in the social world. I see no way to sustain an argument about whether or not most psychotic subjects will or will not ever have a psychotic break during their lifetimes, but my ungrounded hunch is that a great many never do and probably have as good a chance as any other sort of subject of being a "productive member of society"  (or whatever)

4. No structure is immune to being shaken. The psychotic break is surely dramatic (at least in one's imagination, if not always in "reality") but neurotics have break-downs and perverts undoubtedly as well. Likewise the implicit or explicit valuations that one now and then hears applied to one or another structure - hysteria, perversion and, via Deleuze and Guatarri "schizophrenia" (as a brand of psychosis) - which then get championed as somehow exceptional and radical and the path toward the future. I call bunk on all that. It's divisive, potentially abjecting, and simply wrong. It is not unlike the reverse image of the blanket claim that all trans people are ______…. just as ill-founded and just as un-psychoanalytic. A psychotic break is serious business, no doubt, and that it has such marked effects on language is fascinating as well. I do not know as much about psychosis as I would like, but I strongly suspect that the world has known serial killers and sociopaths who were neurotic or perverse.

5. Who is psychodiagnostics for? Seriously. How would you answer that? Here is who it is not for: the analysand. If in your analysis you and your analyst are going round and round about whether you are an hysteric or an obsessional you are not having an analysis, you are aiding in your own pathologization or you're engaged perhaps in some bassakward sort of analytic game. Psychodiagnostics is a guide for the analyst. But in principle, every analysis must have the potential to reconfigure what we understand of the theory. Psychodiagnostics in that perspective would then be a way for them to assess, as best they can, which structure this analysand might be and to adjust their clinical method accordingly, because, as noted above, simply applying the clinical methods of the clinic of neurosis to perverse or psychotic subjects would likely be ineffective (with the perverse) or even detrimental (for psychotics). Given this, when looking to psychoanalysis to help one think through one's dreams or to try to understand others or to provide a gloss on film, it pays to be much more circumspect that most (non-clinical?) Lacanians are wont to be. If a good analyst does not ever tell an analysand You Are This (hysteric, obsessional, perverse, psychotic)!  I would suggest that even if one is not an analyst that a similar restraint and attendance to the unique specifics of oneself, others, or cultural texts guided by, but never ruled through psychoanalytic theory, is actually more psychoanalytic than the reverse would be.

Now, I've kinda shot my wad already - but I promised to consider these nosological categories critically as well, so here goes…

Each of these terms is fraught with difficulties, some internal to psychoanalysis and many external. Hysteria evokes centuries of pathologizing of women and indeed is tied quite firmly - even in Lacan - to feminine subjects, even if those terms, for Lacan, do not denote the same things they do for others - but this is much of the problem! too many competeing claims on a term. Perversion is heavily overdetermined in a whips and chains direction in the popular mind, but from what I understand about the BDSM scene - specifically of ideas like the 'safe word' or the practice of having a contract about the activities to come (pun?) would incline me to suspect that the majority of the folks engaged in such activities are not perverts at all. If the perverse subject acts as the instrument of the big Other's enjoyment, no contract with a mere so-n-so sort of other, or 'safe word' will place a limit on the jouissance of the Other. In fact the very offering up of oneself for "punishment" might negate the potential of it taking place if the other subject is truly perverse. & as noted, psychosis collocates with sociopath and psychopath and serial killer and lunatic and it is nearly unimaginable that a notion like that of "ordinary psychosis" will counter the gravitational push and pull of the established social meanings.

At issue, perhaps, is whether one wishes to talk psychoanalysis only with insiders, or whether one might wish to be able to bring psychoanalysis to those who know none of the terminology and who thus are NOT going to hear these terms as meant by Lacan without an enormous amount of groundwork being laid. Groundwork that will need to be laid again and again with each new person. (& if you think these are thorny issues, wait until you ponder sexuation and Lacan's understanding of the words Man, Woman, Masculine, and Feminine - and prepare for a bit of mind fuck if they are new to you).

Is there any solution to this? 

One could simply foreclose psychoanalysis I guess.

One could attempt to clarify the structure, dynamics and functioning of these terms and propose other ways to name them. This looks like the best strategy to me, but it is not an easy road either. 

If this woman can get a snake to drink
milk out of a straw, surely I can convince
someone to give psychoanalysis
another hearing...

& here is another wrinkle, at a tangent from the above. Per Lacan, once we adopt a structure as the basic template for our desirous relations, we are stuck there. So, once a perv, always a perv. But I find myself wondering about that. That is, for some time I entertained the idea that the psychotic break might very well be visited on anyone, and that it would at that moment impose a psychotic structure upon what had been a neurotic or perverse subject. I say this due to personal experience to a degree, when something heavily invested falls, when that S1 is undermined and no longer ties anything down... these moments can be harrowing, the values of all things seem suspended. Then, what are to we to make of the claim - relevant to the clinic of neurosis - that the analysand must becomes hystericized? If, said of an hysteric analysand, what does this mean exactly? & if said of an obsessional, ditto. (I think that this refers not to structure but to discourse, per seminar xvii, but I might be wrong). & then what about perverse enjoyment, that is when we enjoy seeing someone being subjected to the law "they got what they deserved!"… does this implicate the subject in a perverse structure in any way or not, perhaps because it is not that enjoying subject who imposes the law upon the transgressor?  Or, more succinctly - how do we know that subjects are forever tied to one and only one structure? What havoc would it play with the theory if we proposed that subjects - in certain very specific situations - might move from one structure to another? Would this be a useful flexibility or a monkey wrench into the clinical theory?

Done.                   (dang, close to 2,500 words)

from a review essay by Heather Love

Odd. Had I held off on my last posting for a few hours, I'd have had all this useful cite-age I could have deployed. That said, this speaks very eloquently to reason #3 for abandoning that term that I'd used (in my previous post). I've added some bold to indicate the points that seem most pertinent. 

This is all taken from; 

"'The Right to Change My Mind' : New Work in Trans Studies" 

by Heather Love 

in Feminist Theory 2004 5:91

In the contemporary academy, it has become a reflex to sift all representations, behaviour, self-conceptions, political positions and ways of life into the rough categories of subversive and hegemonic. The struggles that trans subjects face serve as a stark reminder of the limitations – both methodological and ethical – of such habits of mind. In a recent article on transgender studies, Cressida J. Hayes writes,

. . . so much academic literature over-determines and erases the agency of the trans subject in favor of the grasp of technology, medical discourses, history qua regimes of power, or false consciousness. On the other hand, so much popular literature is clearly naively essentialist in its understanding of transsexual experience: tropes of wrong body, being ‘born that way’, ontological necessity and historical and cultural universality tend to be grossly under-theorized and easily feed into other essentializing discourses about sex and gender. (Hayes, 2000: 178–9)

In such accounts, critics fail to attend to the complex and often highly critical stance that transsexual and transgender subjects adopt in relation to both the medical establishment and the discourse of gender. Some of the most interesting recent accounts of the medical construction of sex and gender have come from the work of trans people who have been actively engaged in a struggle for agency with doctors and psychotherapists.

While I would not want to suggest that the project of thinking critically about trans subjectivity or politics ought to be abandoned, it seems clear that the epistemological pressure on the figure of the transsexual needs to be reduced. Academics will continue to interrogate the ideological stakes of transgender and transsexual identity; to ask questions about the meaning of belonging; to redefine the limits of materiality and the human. However, such questioning needs to be offset with an awareness of the kinds of self-questioning and lived experiments currently taking place in the trans community. The new work in transgendered studies has a great deal to teach contemporary criticism – not only about the ‘meaning of gender’, but also about finding a balance between the need to be exemplary in one’s identifications and behaviour and the need for survival, for authenticity and for an expanded sense of agency. (94-5)

Recanting & Mea culpa for "the trans effect"

"mea culpa"
google->image

In a couple of earlier posts, I used the phrase "the trans effect" and even made a label [meta tag thingy] for it. But, even as I offered up that term, and designated what I meant by it, I had some lingering and as yet unarticulated qualms. So, before I go on a brief stint of revisionist blogging (and either change it, or maybe just delete the label), I want to explore why this term deserves the recanting and the mea culpa.

So what was it that I was referring to? just that, because notions of M/F are so overtly and covertly foundational for so many small, medium and large scale bodies of knowledge and practice that the material being of trans people has the effect of unsettling that which had seemed so notionally solid. As I talked about this only a couple of night ago with my dear sister, "You take some body of knowledge that feels nice and solid" (right hand held out as if gripping a large invisible rock) "and you take a trans person" (left hand held out as if holding something) "not that you need an actual person, just the recognition that they exist… and you bring the one into close proximity - conceptually - to the other, and suddenly…" (making surprise face and wiggling right hand fingers) "…the supposedly solid one has gone all squishy."

This does seem to 'work'. Trans subjects do pose fascinating and complex challenges to all manner of knowledge-regimes. But, I do not wish to use the phrase any more for the following reasons, even while I still find the "effect" worth returning to again and again.

1. It risks sounding a bit cute, or worse, it risks giving the impression that this is what makes trans people value or meaningful or (ugh) useful for theory, rather than the inherent value they have as human beings, as subjects with desire, etc. 

2. Given 1, I'd rather not have that phrase linked to my name as I am interested in doing theoretical work which will have some relation to extant trans issues and theories.

3. As noted in an earlier posting, I do not wish to fall into the pattern (played out with many different sorts of subjects in academic, theoretical and philosophical history) of positioning trans people - as a group - as if they were in some specific sense "the privileged subjects of history."  I've argued against such claims in other areas and I do not wish to replicate that very tempting error. & most importantly, while it might be perceived by some as a positive valuation of their lives, it seems just as likely to put an unreasonable and ultimately coercive demand upon the choices of individuals such that each must accord with some unspecified radical and transgressive intent. Such a move, I would argue, both diminishes the worth of many activities that may have little political charge by themselves and further, it could also make recognizing that which truly is radical that much more difficult, through having a pre-existing template for what counts as socio-politically radical.

Mea Culpa sour cherry rakija
from Belgrade

So, to conclude and bid adieu to my unfortunate choice of terminology, let me say that while I think the term does point to something with a certain "reality" - that it is to be hoped that as time passes, it will seem harder and harder to discern this effect until there is no longer any referent for that phrase. Perhaps I am being utopian? it is not as if we have dispensed with racism or sexism or ableism or however any other biases. But, has no progress been made? To quote a source I rarely make use of (Allen Ginsberg);

America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

...no need to limit to "America" tho... 

Could I talk my dissertation into being?

I heard last night of a professor that I know who had planned to write a dissertation with a model like this:

Theoretical chunk

3-4 chapters using the theory to read Lit

Conclusion

… but then… clarifying the theory bit and answering to questions put to him about that turned it into the dissertation. 

… I heard two others remark, bemusedly, that their dissertations were Five Paragraph Expository Essays writ large, structurally speaking. 

… "You can never explain too much" another said. 

Then I made various raunchy insinuations about footnotes, none of which are pertinent here.

But somehow, I want to do all the shit that they tell you not to do. 

Think of it as a book not a diss.

Structure it in a more complex way, such that, perhaps, it has something of a method for its movement from idea to idea, or, going further into poetics, it makes use of prompts, is constructed off the page as a series of improvisations and then transcrib-o-formed into something which captures part of my speech patterns as certain poems have done. (that last act connects to many things i have thought about voice, see below).

Could a text be structured topologically? what the fuck does that mean? 

Could I, in significant part (if not all or most) talk my dissertation into being?

. . . quasi Antin perhaps, but I'd have something of a course plotted, a lattice of ideas on a page that would be there to refer to, even the loosey goosey 'word cloud' would do the job.

I'd ask if my theory friends would like to start a salon, but wait - I've tried that. or it was a journal (still a good idea). 

                             video?          hello youtube? 

Can one do a dissertation refusing an endpoint, any specific goal and instead grow something until it feels done? (this is again garden variety assemblage/method poetics, but telos is hard to find here)

the Tractatus is a rather austere model - but I'm thinking of some principle of connection and collocation which would be used to assemble as many small and tightly contained 'chunks' )technical term for poets, you might not know it( these generated as needed to perform tasks, exemplification, context creation, linkage, concept creation, concept deployment, object analysis, image analysis, relational analysis (those last three - read them as real, imaginary, symbolic?) … various functions are determined to be needed here here and here, chunks which perform these functions are sorted into the places. Then if the chunks are quasi-transcriptions, tightened into ecrit...

Ok, so then… 

Way back when on the blog, I had this post wondering about dissertation stuff and I took a pot shot at what a trajectory through it might've involved. Here it be (note the implicit 5 para essay vibe as well):

Language Embodied / Embodied Language 

• What psychoanalysis, Freud and Lacan preeminently, have to contribute to understanding the body's imbrication in language. 

• Voice, a unique site of interface between the two, particularly at its more extreme points or edges - sound poetry, glossolalia, aphasias, psychosis as well as in modes which diminish the sense of subjective engagement as with routinized and depersonalized speech or parapraxes as discussed by Freud and others.

• Voice as object.

• Speech (parole) vs Langue, as well as Speech as semiosis (ala Peirce).

It seems to me that this offers at least the potential to allow for some discussion of art (if I limit to performance art or sound art that uses voice), film (obviously, though the devil will be in the details), fiction (this is less obvious, perhaps there are pioneering studies to be made of author's reading their work? the text-heavy and disembodied nature of most fiction is harder to envision in this daydream I am having), and, without any difficulty, poetry (the biggest challenge here perhaps being that I've tended to avoid writing about the stuff I love the most, not wanting to link it to the dynamics of the academic economy).

There is some of this that I still have a big pull toward. By tags; Body, Voice, Speech all with Psychoanalysis obviously. The ways that we can see, measure, otherwise discern or perhaps only posit upon the body itself the effects of language (as it is treated here) but ultimately the effects of the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The object voice - voice as objet a - as Real. Voice as unique intersection of language and body, voice in the three orders… that sort of thing. 

Hi, I'm Charles Peirce.

I don't get into it above but when I mention Peirce I was think about ways to use Peirce as an alternative vocabulary for discussing speech. That book call The Machinery of Talk by Anne Freadman - there was something I read in that that made me think of other ways than Saussure and Jakobson to talk about speech, still using the idea of the chain and of the automaton - but ditching the X Y axes of the formalist/structuralist style. 

Charles Peirce en femme
Google -> Image :
"charles peirce"

What I'm shying away from at present is certain ways of talking about language, and even more of using the various awkward or technical argots of the many regional discourses or disciplines that already have their own distinctly regional investments in language as the pre-eminent object of interest, or that through which all else must be filtered, or both. That is, a definite demoting of language as the privileged prism through which to grok everything else. It has its place, but maybe it's a place best thought of as but one ring out of a borromean chain (minimum is three rings, but in principle there is no limit to how many rings).

What has changed is the routes taken toward the body. 

I spent some months reading things about brains. Neuroplasticity. There are posts here, look if you care. & I lined up some books by the neuropsychoanalytic folks really and truly intending to read them when I swerved into another territory and suddenly I was reading about sex and gender as lens on the body and then just for their own sakes, and then something tripped me into reading specifically about transgender issues - I think it was coming upon Please Select Your Gender (Patricia Gherovici) on Karnac's site and then getting it and that sent me deeper into trans stuff on the one hand and coincidentally Dean's Beyond Sexuality has a chapter on trans, and off I went on another book buying spree. & other stuff too, more than can be mentioned here etc.

Bzzzzzz Bzzzzzzz

Am still wondering about my pre-order that keeps getting delayed of that book by Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou which promises to be smart, psychoanalytic and all about brain stuff and neuroscience and philosophy and what not. 

So, not ruling out a bit of neuro/psycho-analytic input (broadly construed).

But it seems much more immediately of interest to think about what in a recent post, I called the trans effect, would be upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, specifically in so far as it addresses itself to the body and voice. 

& with regard to the readings of texts. I'm torn. I see the utility of that endeavor - at least relative to certain kinds of jobs - but then again, I have never had any real idea about what job I might get with what I do, and the whole poetry backdoor plan is also there and not forgotten. (Not that it is a golden parachute or any thing like that). But, wrt "readings" again, I'd much rather do 20 small ones, that were machines of exemplification or problematization of the theory - rather than being theoretical explications of the texts in question. (off the top of my head, I have the analysts discourse in Faulkner's The Hamlet, lots of things I could still do with Black Hole, there is Inland Empire to draw from I guess, my queer reading of Malina, could it not also be a trans reading to a small degree (is Ich, the woman "trapped inside the body" of Malina, a man?), I could do many things with Spicer possibly again working with lacanian discourses and or with Peirce, The Limits of Control and the desire of the Other?, & somewhere I do want to get pooperific - not just as a nod to Cal's interests either (tho, it will serve that purpose) but to work with abjection and thus to be able to highlight processes which produce abjection in others (like the Master's, but potentially other discourses as well) which is surely pertinent to trans people who are targeted rather mercilessly in precisely those ways. I could go on.

Echt!

If I did this tomorrow, would it sound like a different dissertation entirely? 

[things largely left out - Queer theory, Sexuation/Sexual Difference vs Gender / Sex, Ideology Critique, ...oops]

The Gender Continuum - Is there such a thing?

Again and again (then again some more) when reading about, talking about, or simply listening in on the public discourse on "gender", one encounters the idea that, rather than the dimorphism or binary "opposites" bequeathed to us as "The" sex/gender regime, that there is instead a continuum, and that we all fall along it somewhere, with only the tiny portion of us positioned at this or that end. 

A concept that the graphic here exemplifies in an image (imagine it being much wider).

check me out, I'm on a continuum!
(that's me in the slightly less flared gauchos, I think)

& probably, lots of folks have raised doubts about this continuum idea as well. I just haven't read any of that and surely I have not heard anyone in the public sphere contesting the model of a gender continuum for any reason other than to reassert the two term status quo. Should it be that there is a great article or book, blog post or post-it note that totally makes my thoughts below irrelevant, I'd love it if someone would tell me about it. Read & cite, so much easier.

It seems to me that in the vast majority of cases, when someone proposes a continuum of gender, that they are doing so for what they take to be a progressive intent. I do not wish to disparage or otherwise bring the diss down upon those who forward this idea, or those who may believe very passionately in this notion. 

Given the choice between the two models (& why not assume that the culture at large will follow my lead) - Binary sex/gender dimorphism -vs- the Gender Continuum, I would choose the latter without a second thought as it obviously provides greater flexibility and, in principle, is aimed at a loosening of the sedimented meanings built upon sex and gender.

A'ight then.     Having said that…

What troubles me about the notion of The Gender Continuum is not all of that positive stuff which makes it a better model than the binary one we are largely subjected to, but simply that if the terms at the opposite ends of the continuum remain Male and Female, Man and Woman, or Masculinity and Femininity (in the ultimately stereotypical, if not necessarily false,culturally prescribed senses of these terms) - then our model forecloses the possibility that there might be positions to occupy which are neither Masculine nor Feminine. Arguably all the continuum model offers here is one strategy to legitimate "feminine" men and "masculine" women and "indeterminate" middle positions as ways of being. As crucial as this is (make no mistake) it nonetheless sustains, even as it might in many articulations repress or perhaps evade, an opposition between the two poles. If they are, arguably still at "opposite" ends, how easy is it to think of them as unopposed?

If the old traditional sexist or genderist model was two points, the continuum model gives us a discrete line. Is there nothing which might give us more?

It seems to me we need either some kind of 'field' model, or at the very least an additional pertinent axis to the one that the continuum allows us. 

The trouble with the idea of a second continuum intersecting the first is simply what it would be a measure of, ditto any third (though a third could allow plotting as space rather than plane). 

But if we think of gender as a bounded field or zone then it might be possible to place Male and Female at two points within it and to place Masculine and Feminine at two other points. These points are not at the edges (maybe the edges just plop you out on the other side again like in the old arcade game Asteroids) and they do not define any sort of absolute end points. Instead those 'poles' were instead something closer to vanishing points. One would feel them as implied within the field, but they'd remain nonetheless outside of any finally securable place that one could occupy. Rather we might imagine movement paced like lives are paced, with efforts here or there aiming toward or away from the various poles. In such a model, at issue would be the relative proximity of any subject not to this or that end of a continuum (i.e., resulting in 60/40 and 80/20 sorts of splits as descriptor) but instead one in which a given subject position might be quite close to both masculinity and femininity, as well as to male, but further away from female and have ways to move within the space thus defined. For the cisgendered, this might be a sort of ebb and flow, potentially unconscious. Thinking of my own life there have undoubtedly been times when the demand was quite intense that I be a man, act masculine, etc. & certainly this has also been at times my own demand. But there has been resistance too.

Without being able to manufacture such a model for you here, I am feeling a bit inhibited in trying to clarify this. But it would seem to me that beyond simply marking this as a 'plane' that one could work it up topographically - perhaps with a 'high point' in the middle such that the asexual or nonsexual subjects might have that which is specific to them in this registered - degree of sexuality as 'pitch'? I dunno. tricky other questions arise, no time for those now. 

Instead, ditch topography and resort to topology. Arguably to conceptualize M and F not as continnum, but as Möbius strip, might be an even better model. By "better", I mean in greater accordance with the progressive intentions that I impute to those who propose a continuum. I think this does a better job than the continuum for a couple of reasons.   1st, it gives a way to render graphically that there is not simply one direction to go in to become more feminine or more masculine (sort of obvious right? just as there is no one way to be a man or a woman or...)    2nd, it preserves an aspect of the opposition common to thinking M & F, but at the same moment undermines it far more than a continuum (which might as easily be thought of as a 'leak' toward the opposed pole). There is much more to think about all of this, and if one were truly trying to model "gender", I suspect that even the Möbius might retain too much of the (implicit and I suppose fantasmatic) binary. But unlike a continuum model, topological figures are infinitely plastic and to construct more complex, more ramified models and even 'figures' which the mind cannot imaginarize as they no longer conform to three dimension space is very possible. & why, after all, should conceptualizations of gender or sex or sexuality need to conform to Euclidean space any more than they must accord with Logic (that is, I take gender identification to, of necessity, contain a great admixture of unconscious desire).

This is a Klein bottle, its outside is its inside
and its inside is its outside etc. 

& before I close, might there be a way to rethink the ever so common statement which some hold to with great conviction and others dispute with vehemence… I refer to the "trapped in the wrong body" trope that is common in the literature of transexuality specifically. While it would be foolish I think to shut the door on biological inputs to any of these questions, I cannot help but to feel that arguments, inevitably essentialist at some level of consequence, that seek to ground the origin of transgender (or homosexuality, and a host of other things) in brain matter, or genes reduce the persons impacted by such claims to object status. While it has the effect of, at least in principle if not in social reality perhaps (compare racism as an issue of skin tone one is born with), taking away the stigma - as who can be blamed for their own genes? it opens the door to medico-technological attempts to 'cure' trans people in advance, or worse yet - abort if tests reveal there is a trans baby in the oven. This fantasy lurks around a lot of the early scientific investigation into homosexuality it seems. I would rather, in spite of the difficulties, in spite of the lack of a ready and purportedly definitive answer, prefer to consider trans people as in most of the important ways that we use to grant respect and rights to others, to be just like everybody else. That is, not as objects simply acting out the imperatives of genetics but as subjects with a desirous relationship to their lives. As such, might a figure like the Klein bottle or certain other topological figures in which it is possible to model an interior which is other, an exterior, in turn surrounded by an interior which is again "other", provide a way to discuss this that avoids the polarizations that, to a degree at least, form the horizon of the discussion at present?

This is a Möbius shoe, so of course I had to use this.
I also saw a Klein bottom knit hat,
a Möbius chair (very stylish) and an amazing amount of other stuff,
from other knitted topological figures
to buildings made on the model of the Möbius.
But back to the shoe!  What Lacanian could do without such footwear?
I wonder if Joan Copjec has a pair?
What about Zizek? 

ADDENDA (17 September, 2014) — is there is a way to add a photo comment, I was not able to figure it out, so here then is an image sent by the anonymous commenter below. 

"Here is one example, as per request." — Anon