BUTLERIAN QUESTIONING TO DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTIVISM:

AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEMATIC OF THE BODY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Abstract

This text intends to rethink the dispute of feminist epistemologies regarding the conception of gender discursive constructions from the background of Freud and Lacan’s thesis. Our basis is Butler’s critique of binary feminist theories regarding the substantialization of the sexual body: if the sexual body is constructed by discourse, it is also a subversive element of discourse, since it cannot be completely determined by cultural gender binarism. We use excerpts from the debate between Butler-Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as a “model case” where such epistemological questions could be analyzed: at first, psychoanalysis is one of the main critical targets of the feminist “second wave”; secondly, psychoanalysis would also have been mobilized in favor of the binary feminist cause; however, for Butler, such feminists would not have sufficiently criticized psychoanalysis, for not attacking the essentialized sexual bodily root that would sustain the binary division between
sexes; finally, Butler emphasizes the critical potential that psychoanalysis holds,
given the subversive and plastic resistance of the unconscious, drive, desire and
body, central notions for non-binary feminist epistemology and remodeling of
discursive constructivism.