Sexual Ambiguities

Morel reads sexual difference through Lacan's formulae of sexuation, treating masculine and feminine not as gender identities but as two positions taken up in relation to the phallic function and to jouissance. She works the formulae against the clinic rather than expounding them in the abstract, drawing on cases of psychosis, transsexualism, and intersex states where the assignment of sex fails to settle and the subject must construct a position of their own.

Across the chapters she distinguishes the anatomical, the civil, and the unconscious registers of sex, and tracks how a subject's identifications, symptoms, and delusional constructions can supply what the symbolic did not. The push-to-the-woman in paranoia, the logic of the exception, and the choice of sex are examined as distinct clinical problems. For the practitioner, the payoff is a vocabulary precise enough to hear how a given patient has answered the question of what sex they are.