GENDER TROUBLE 121

Gender Trouble within gender configurations which contest the fixity of masculine and feminine placements with respect to the paternal law In effect, the possibility of multiple identifications (which are not finally reducible to primary or founding identifications that are fixed within masculine and feminine positions) suggests that the Law is not deterministic and that “the” law may not even be singular The debate over the meaning or subversive possibilities of identifications so far has left unclear exactly where those identifications are to be found.The interior psychic space in which identifications are said to be preserved makes sense only if we can understand that interior space as a phantasized locale that serves yet another psychic function In agreement with Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok it seems, psychoanalyst Roy Schafer argues that “incorporation” is a fantasy and not a process; the interior space into which an object is taken is imagined, and imagined within a language that can conjure and reify such spaces.38 If the identifications sustained through melancholy are “incorporated,” then the question remains: Where is this incorporated space? If it is not literally within the body, perhaps it is on the body as its surface signification such that the body must itself be understood as an incorporated space Abraham and Torok have argued that introjection is a process that serves the work of mourning (where the object is not only lost, but acknowledged as lost).39 Incorporation, on the other hand, belongs more properly to melancholy, the state of disavowed or suspended grief in which the object is magically sustained “in the body” in some way Abraham and Torok suggest that introjection of the loss characteristic of mourning establishes an empty space, literalized by the empty mouth which becomes the condition of speech and signification The successful displacement of the libido from the lost object is achieved through the formation of words which both signify and displace that object; this displacement from the original object is an essentially metaphorical activity in which words “figure” the absence and surpass it Introjection is understood to be the work of mourning, but incor86