Abstract
The title of the article, “Stalled in the Stall,” is a commentary on the present state of discourse surrounding transsexuality, particularly concerning access to the gendered bathroom. It points to an irony: media representations of transsexual and transgender identities include myriad of expressions, bringing to view the notion of identity as partial, contradictory, and not easily read. And yet, the popular media talk and discussions on the transsexual subject are mostly by way of the bathroom: worries about accommodations, rights, and problems concerning violence and access. In this article, the author plays with the stall as a signifier that allows us to hypothesize about unconscious phantasies and desires that structure the encounter for and with transsexuality and stall our capacity to think analytically. The nature of the debate, the author suggests, repeats the history of homophobia and transphobia. Associating to the stall as an emotionally charged space linked to innermost primal phantasies and anxieties may shed light on the ways in which some dilemmas seem to be stalled on a particular object and may allow the exploration of the phantasies that underscore the capacity to imagine gender with psychoanalytic sensitivity. The clinic too is affected by a magnetizing pull toward sameness; certitude replaces difference in which the body is often mystified as known. Beyond the fixations that are well documented, the article raises two new questions: Can a turn to the clinic help us understand our mindless state in the bathroom? And, in turn, can the bathroom, as a primal scene of natality, be fantasized as a thought experiment with which to think about the clinic?
