Fine Arts

"Jacques Lacan’s theory is carved out of three over-arching structural categories or ‘orders’: the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. The real lies outside signification as the realm of the impossible plenitude and bliss, the materiality of objects, trauma, psychosis and death, ‘the field of non-meaning.’ For Lacan, gendered identities, indeed identity at all exist only in the intersubjectivity of language - the realm of the symbolic. This is where we bring ourselves into existence as subjects through identifying ourselves with the meanings of language which pre-exist us and which will continue to define the world after we are gone".

Excerpt from Theorizing gender, (Malden, MA : Blackwell, 2002) written by Rachel Aslop, Annette Fitzsimons, and Kathleen Lennon.