My supposition is that Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial-Feminine has something to offer transgender studies, if only because the character Tiresias, who changes sex, is central to what Ettinger refers to as the transgression with-in-to the Feminine. I have argued elsewhere that there is a discourse and an aesthetics particular to transgender that is not only submerged in psychoanalysis but rendered pathological or psychotic (Cavanagh, 2017). Although Ettinger is not a transgender studies scholar and, to the best of my knowledge, has not worked analytically with transgender clients, her conception of the transgression with-in to the Feminine gives us a template to think about Tiresian-like transitions. A Tiresian-like transition is not the same as a transsexual transition (but the latter may involve the former). It is, in Ettingerian terms, an entry into the matrixial whereby we co-emerge, transmutate and change with Others in unconscious and asymmetrical ways.
Tiresias indexes an Other sexual difference in Ettinger’s formulation of the matrixial and this is, consequently, relevant to transgender studies. But the transgression of interest to Ettinger is matrixial. As such, it involves the “possibility of transgressing between male and female with-in a matrixial feminine dimension where Other and Outside are fatally engaged with I and inside…” (Ettinger, 2000: 198). The transgression with-in to the Feminine is not about becoming a woman in an identitarian sense but, rather, about entering into a Feminine dimension of experience that refuses binaries between outside and inside, self and Other, male and female and so on. Referring specifically to Tiresias, Ettinger asserts that the “transgression between male and female is not a passage to the radical Other nor transcending to the ultimately exterior, but a metramorphosing with-in-out of selves with-in-to the feminine that passes along the threads that turn, like a Mobius strip, the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside” (2000: 198). As I will explain in what follows, the Tiresian origin-story involves an encounter-event with copulating snakes, and Goddess Hera, in Peleponnese, that elicits a metramorphic change. For Ettinger, a metramorphosis is a borderlinking and co-affecting relation in the matrixial web whereby partial-subjects are changed in/by the encounter-event with an Other. As she explains, metramorphosis “draws a nonpsychotic yet beyond-the-phallus connection between the feminine and creation” (2006: 64). Metramorphosis is a co-affective borderlinking, which enables change akin to the Deleuzian notion of ‘becoming.’ The metramorphic transgression enables the subject to access a “surplus beyond” the phallic axis. This surplus is about the transformation of what Ettinger calls phallic limits into thresholds.
In the myth, Tiresias turns into a Woman and enters into what Ettinger calls an Other axis of difference. While I focus on an Other sexual difference theorized by Ettinger in this chapter, let us remember that there are other dimensions of difference yet to be narrativized in psychoanalysis. It is an established fact that transpeople are subject to erasure, discrimination, and are denied access to public space: the transphobic bathroom laws in the US are but one contemporary example. But I am here concerned about the space of the clinic, the state of psychoanalytic theorizing and the Feminine (as an axis of difference) more generally. We have yet to account for the multiple harms engendered by the negation and expulsion of transpeople in psychoanalysis at the level of the International Psychoanalytic Association, its constituent organizations, the clinic, and its training curriculum. The collateral damage done by the omission and pathologization of transpeople under the auspices of Oedipal psycho-sexual development is increasingly well established (see, for example, the recent special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly [2017] on “Transgender and Psychoanalysis”). We can no longer ignore or side-line the contributions made by transgender scholars, artists, clinicians, and analysands to the psychoanalytic scene.