Transgender Embodiment: A Lacanian Approach

Abstract

The author uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to conceptualize transgender embodiment, focusing on the Lacanian concept "objet a" to analyze how transpeople may be uniquely attuned to a fundamental lack in being endemic to all subjects of language. Objet a is central to the Imaginary register where body images and sex morphology intermingle. The author discusses objet a in relation to the mirror (and the Other's cisgender gaze), anxiety, postsurgical scars, linguistics, and Thing-like feelings of monstrosity (born of transphobia). For those who are transgender, the a may register as an embodied disjunction between gender identity and natal sex assignment.