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Does the (Fantastic) Transwoman Exist? Oren GOZLAN A Commentary on the Film A Fantastic Woman, a Chilean Drama directed by Sebastian Lelio, and the Question of Psychoanalytic Pedagogy

We now live in a time when there are different ways of thinking and representing gender, and in this regard, the transsexual subject represents a new kind of subjectivity, that along with other individuals subjected to exclusion, such as autistic or indigenous groups, is oriented by a desire for social change. There are multiple realities that are at stake, and there is a question of how far we can go when we think about what is possible or the human’s determination, and this comes to a boiling point on the matter of gender. The attempt to change the nature of how to make meaning also involves the capacity to face difficult questions and to have the courage to tolerate anxiety and frustration without falling back to compliance or destruction. There are new demands being made from LGBTQ groups for a different way of approaching discourse on gender, including demands for recognition, inclusion, and, recently, an apology for a history of willful disregard.

The slow-moving creep of discourses about gender now involves a move from looking at transsexuality towards examining the cisgender reception of trans subjectivities and demands for recognition. In turn, trans communities are making demands from within for education about their own subject position in relation to transsexuality. There is an intensity that belongs to the topic of education, because it is a site to which we bring our own desires, our hatred of dependency and development, and our tacit fantasies of what it takes to change minds. This paper engages with the question of film as one site of education, in which the central question is the viewers’ reception. The question of reception is crucial, because clinicians are now beginning to think more deeply about their own work in relation to gender demands, and about their own education in matters of gender. In this paper, I offer a brief reviewing of the film A Fantastic Woman (2017), a passionate melodrama by Sebastian Leilo, a Chilean director, with the question of reception in mind. The use of the melodrama, I suggest, animates a particular kind of passion, and if as analytic viewers, we also study passion when we study this film, what sense can we make of melodrama in relation to the film’s reception? What do we think about the film’s effect of addressing mentalities towards gender? The larger question I attempt to address in this paper is this: what do we think about the film as a pedagogical tool in affecting people’s minds?

A Fantastic Woman is a film about inexplicability. It presents us with a geometry of what would be the stakes for the aftermath of a transgender love affair. Yet it is a fiction taken at its tragic dimensions. The movie begins with Marina and Orlando celebrating Marina’s birthday. Orlando presents Marina with an envelope containing a missing object. In a piece of paper, there is a promise of a trip to Iguazu Falls. The “would-be” tickets themselves are lost. Soon after returning from the restaurant, Orlando collapses. Marina rushes him to the hospital, where he dies. It is at this point that the movie leaves the transgender scene and moves into the trauma of the society: there is no time for grief for Marina, who is confronted with an onslaught of humiliations and attacks. She is misgendered, believed to be a prostitute, suspected of committing murder or of having engaged in bizarre and deadly sex. She is asked by her lover’s wife and son to leave the apartment she shared with her lover and is violently attacked for attending her lover’s funeral. In a normative rule-governed reality, there is no freedom even when you die.

The film opens up the clichés of the mistress’ story. The new narrative, involving a love affair between a young transwoman and an older man, challenges the fault line of the old story because it opens up the repressed qualities of an affair, its enigmatic desires for escape and entrapment, the enigmatic qualities of attraction and its persecutory anxieties. It presents a different, non-normative narrative of old conflicts, burdened by new additions like questions around identity and escape from heterosexuality. Yet as I was watching the film, I wondered, does the transwoman exist in the fantasy of the society? Judging by the film, the trans body is imagined as having no interiority: how does Marina make sense of her lover’s family? Of her lover? Of her situation? It is the family who takes the center stage, while the audience watches a transsexual being beaten. The family cannot believe that a husband and a father would fall in love with someone they could not anticipate. They are the persecutory face of the society that disavows the capacity of someone to decide what they want to do or be.

The story of transitioning, one could argue, is one of taking ownership. One of making meaning of an intricate story, whose traces one is unable to capture or undo. It is a story that is never-ending, whose consequences are unknown. The advent of transsexuality has opened for us a new position of gender as it raises the question of whether femininity and masculinity, as they are conceptualized, are the extremes of gender, and yet are not the whole of gender’s capabilities. A broad story of transsexuality, where the center of a question is not physical violation, aggression, or rape, however, is hard to come by. It is precisely this difficulty that brings the film A Fantastic Woman so close to the trauma of gender, and in this way, it is traumatic and hard to watch. In essence, the film is not so much about the transsexual, of whom we know very little, or their affair, of which we know even less, or about Marina’s relationship to life, of which we know nothing at all. A Fantastic Woman is a film about the experience of the scorned woman, who is betrayed. And so, we may wonder, why are we seeing it as emblematic of the trans experience? After all, how well does anyone do with an affair? Would it be different if we placed any other disclaimed person in Marina’s place (e.g., a young boy, a gay man)?

The space of the disclaimed subject, I suggest, is interchangeable. Yet, the radical moment in the film, I believe, is sexuality, not trans. It is about two people who surprised each other and had sex. That disrupted the normative marriage, the age relation, and gender. The normative is disrupted not so much because of who Marina and Orlando are, but because of what they did in bed. Yet, what did they do in bed? The big question of the sexual act is not asked. The voyeuristic fixation about the genitals is an extremely veiled curiosity in the film. And yet, like Poe’s purloined letter, it becomes evident through the question of how unbelievable the relationship is felt to be. It is the relationship between Marina and Orlando whose impossibility is at the heart of the movie and that remains alienated in the film. Why is Marina and Orlando’s relationship so unimaginable to the heteronormative family? Partly because they thought they knew. So, the fantasy of mastery is the defense against the anxiety of not knowing the other. The viewer may experience a torn loyalty, see an impossible paradise, or feel anger towards the couple. The film, I suggest, is made from the point of view of the society that cannot make sense of the transsexual, at the same time that it does not make sense. The central question of the film becomes the ways in which the body is addressed by normalcy, and so we are witness to the brutality of the society and what it does to the transsexual.

A Fantastic Woman is also a film about adolescent fantasies and is steeped in ideality: Marina and Orlando’s ideality of the affair and the viewer’s ideality, that if we could only explain the brutal reality, there will be tolerance. These idealities present a dilemma that also belongs to psychoanalysis: can there be an address to the normative

that isn’t normative? That does not repeat the trauma? The question can also be framed along the lines of Butler (1993) and Britzman’s address to pedagogy: can psychoanalysis admit the unthinkability of normalcy and how it is constituted again and again? (Britzman, 1998, p.85). What are the stakes of addressing the aggressor? The problem with an affective plea for tolerance and inclusion is that it is saturated in the belief that “one discourse can make room for those it must exclude” (Britzman, 1998, p.86). The commitment to tolerance, they seem to suggest, is already addressing the large society that is rendering the transsexual invisible. The commitment to tolerance is close to the death drive: its movement towards reduction of tension creates de-differentiation, which erases subjectivity by presuming to know self and other. What would it be to consider transsexuality as a human condition, not a social event?

In singling out the ways in which transphobia works, pedagogy’s preoccupation with inclusion is engaged in what Eve Sedgwick (2008) terms “minoritizing.” The discursive tendency to “minoritize” or particularize identities situates heteronormative/trans or homo distinction as “an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed...minority” (Sedgwick, 2008, p.1). Eve Sedgwick’s problematization of the discursive tendency of “minoritizing” or particularizing identities, which addresses the other as known, intervenes in a particular way to disrupt the pedagogical idea that only certain people that have certain positions are allowed to understand certain things and everyone else, who does not occupy that position, will never know. Minoritizing discourses attempt to stabilize something that is fleeting and momentary. From the vantage point of a minoritizing discourse, transsexuality is in a constant state of emergency—it is a call to act: rescuing, recognition, rights. Particularities are static, timeless, and unconscious, in that what is desired is always presumed known and where the structure of identity and gender lies becomes a fixation point. As soon as we place the unconscious as the center of life, however, we have in the markers of gender something very fantasied and idealized and disparaged and aggressive, whatever side we are on (masculine or feminine).

What is at stake for the analyst in limiting analysis to the brute “reality” of experience? We run the risk of repeating the conflation of the real of the body—forever and universally inaccessible—with its signifiers, whose multiple psychic meanings exceed socio-cultural significations. What is left behind is the question of desire and the conundrum of self-difference that is both a human condition and a subjective situation. In a story where victim and perpetrator are clearly defined, desire takes a second stage. What are the anxieties that move us away from the transsexual story? What would it be to offer an analysis of anxieties over the body, the idea of transitioning and its disorienting effect on the fragility of identity? And so, is there such a thing as a therapeutic pedagogy that can open our discourse to uncertainty? There is something being cancelled out, I believe, in current discourses that focus on the transsexual as victim of discrimination and intolerance, because we are reproducing a binary in such a way that our pedagogy is at stake. And what gets cancelled is the subjectivity of the transsexual person themselves. And while we must insist on the right to have rights, which also brings us to essentialism and stability, these, I suggest, like the clothes we wear, are a fleeting cover up for the incommensurability between becoming and being read. From the vantage point of the transsexual, how would the film be considered? I think that here, we move away from the question of equality, to the question of difference. This question does not center on the way the body is addressed by normativity, but on the capacity to move from the problem of identity to the particularity of an emotional situation.

All transformations are described by Bion (1965) as a catastrophic emotional situation. As a transformative process, transsexuality is not simply a triumphant story, but also a site of a catastrophe, in a Bionian sense. The wish to belong and to create something for the self is not only a freeing experience, but also very painful, and there has to be a sadness that is part of any situation of major change, as one’s fantasy is bound to fail. And indeed, I do not think that as analysts, we can give up the idea of suffering. To make meaning of the idea of transsexual suffering, however, the pain of transitioning must be tied to the complexity of a subject’s own experience, beyond the question of how the other makes them suffer. In other words, the victim position forecloses the idea of difference by becoming preoccupied solely by the claustrum of rights. For the analyst to understand the mental configurations in different terms than the repetition of what the society already does to the transsexual, the analyst too must enter the relational imaginary, which may also include sadomasochistic wishes on both parts. I think this involves a turn to the question of adolescent ideality on the part of both theory and its object.

The adolescent, as Kristeva (2007) reminds us, is also a passionate creature who believes in absolute satisfaction and refuses ambivalence as a way to simultaneously keep an infallible Other and evade the irremediably disappointing real other. The analyst’s wish for total understanding of the transsexual situation is a kind of ideality that wards off the anxiety of not knowing. Can the analyst hear the ideality in their own viewpoint and those of the patient? Can they maintain an opening, grounded on the acceptance of trying to understand something without having to act? Here are the tensions we face when we are caught in the question of opening minds to something that the mind obstructs: the dilemma of psychoanalysis is always the notion that the very capacity to open our ideas is also the very thing that closes them. And so, we have to study the obstacles for thinking, one of which is the mastery of knowledge. And we may wonder if the only place where open-mindedness is possible is in dreamlife. Resistance in psychoanalytic treatment is to be expected, and so why would not the same resistance also play out in other modes of ideas that challenge the normativity of thought or the freedom to think something unknown? In the clinic, analyst and patients struggle through the lure of the imaginary that promises full recognition and mimetic symmetry. Yet the body has a very difficult time becoming abstract.

There is a narcissistic blow that plays out on both sides of the analytic couch, where we often think that our ego is in charge of our house. This fantasy maps nicely into the society that promises a normative life, even though normativity is already a fantasy. An emotional relationship to an object that I don’t know, however, requires for me to be interested in one’s obstacles, to knowing this Other: to countertransference, anxieties, and projections. If from the transsexual situation, we learn what it is like to question our intelligibility, the anxiety about transsexual discourse affects the cis-gender’s understanding of their sexuality, because there, the familiar is rendered strange. I think the psychoanalytic clinic is oriented by this impasse. It is a scene of pedagogy because it engages the question of how to communicate the ethical dilemmas of transsexuality beyond its concrete procedures. Is there a way to speak of self-other processes in ways that do not condemn individuals into the prison house of identity, even though they may be residing there temporarily?

There are a number of idealities I have discussed in this paper: those of the film, the relationship, the analyst, and of the viewer. And one of the difficulties is that these idealities animate a constellation of anxieties that I am trying to understand through film. Films are often used as points of discussion. Clinical writing draws on a cultural viewpoint, and this film presents such a viewpoint. A Fantastic Woman presents us with multiple viewpoints, some more dominant than others. But it assumes that there is a crisis of misunderstanding that occurs after a significant loss.