The following is an excerpt from a longer unpublished work.

In “On Transformations in Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism” Freud explores the apparent interchangeability of the concepts shit/money/baby/penis in the unconscious processes of his patients, and leans on his account of the stages of female psychosexual development. These stages carry from penis envy that is transformed into a wish for a child, into a sort of different kind of wish for a penis again but one that comes in the guise of a wish for a man. 

Freud thinks of penis and baby in terms of their character as masses, and more specifically masses felt against mucous membranes. He folds shit in as another type of mass, which he relates to money by way of anally retentive personality traits. The patients who are miserly and pedantic also have a history of hoarding their shit. Amassing a mass is a stand-in for amassing wealth – fear of poverty looms large. 

For a child shit has value and bestowing it on the parents is a gift, an act of generosity.

There is a description in a biography of Elvis Presley that says that during his autopsy, doctors had found his bowel to be full of a “clay-like substance”.

The child gifting shit to the parents is also an expression of trust in them, an expression of love.

Perhaps there is something about Elvis’ hoarding of his “gift”, that aside from pointing to his austere beginnings, could be read in the light of certain forms of normative masculinity – notably ones that see expression of emotion as weakness, as unmanly, and that encourage men to keep their feelings to themselves. 

Sure, there is great sentimental expressiveness to his performances, but one never really knows where the line between suspension of disbelief and bad faith runs. The emotional charge of “Suspicious Minds” is much undermined by knowledge of his serial philandering during his marriage to Priscilla. 

One wonders what is the significance of this magical stuff (the shit that is no longer shit) in a broader sense – and for women. Where Freud would probably have seen a regression into penis envy or an unrequited wish for a child, a more contemporary observer might see something else – possibly a creative vision. “Clay-like substance” evokes thoughts of something that can be moulded into something else. It has in fact already undergone a transformation, from shit to something like clay. From static mass to pliable matter, material-in-waiting.

In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud explains melancholia as being directed at a loss more difficult to quantify than that of mourning. There is a blockage that prevents the specificities and history of a loss, or losses, a sense of disappointment, a rejection, end of love, from entering consciousness. The loss is turned inwards and on the ego, which is destroyed. Of a case of melancholia, he gives an example of a “betrothed girl jilted at the altar”, which while cringy, suggests that you can’t mourn the loss of something you were not culturally validated as having, that you did not possess in the eyes of the world, something you, as far as the world is concerned, never had – for Freud’s jilted girl “a marriage” “a husband” – for someone else “a penis”, “a baby”, for Elvis, “a shit”. You become melancholic and lose yourself instead.

For the child retention of faeces is also an expression of will – a means of control – something often asserted in defiance (or maybe in an effort to counter feelings of powerlessness).

The inaccessibility of the lost object is to a degree a product of the inability of dominant culture, posing as objective reality, to contain the experience of loss. Its parameters are too narrow. It fails to validate your experience as having substance (it’s just this, just that, just a disappointment, just a mass of ambivalence that connects to a pattern), so you hold onto it. Control becomes bilateral (even if one side is oppression and the other defense). Shit builds up.

The things you weren’t acknowledged as having lost, themselves might have an unreality about them, be ideal and intangible, normative apparitions of what you should have (in order to be real), a penis, a baby, a shit, some money – sex. 

The sense of loss attached to (hetero)sexuality is so blatant – even if publicly denied – that commercial and technological advances have been designed around this disavowed hole and for the purpose of accumulating potential to fill it with. Potential intended to remain just that, clay-like substance. Like Tinder, the swiping but not chatting, the chatting but not going on dates, the going on dates but not having relationships. But I also don’t mean to imply that hoarding potential is about aversion to commitment. One could say it is indeed a form of commitment: a commitment to an idea. It is about holding onto the promise of something. 

And inasmuch as the patriarchal heterosexual paradigm still asserts its dominance over our emotional lives and sexual interactions, in however disguised and insidious ways (or however explicit ones), there is also still the penis that insistently turns into shit, though not always into a baby, or money.

If you carry your shit around for long enough, will an unrequited wish for a child transform into clay-like substance? And, is the magical character of the clay-like substance tied to it not having been tested against the reality of the outside world? Will any effort to express it come with the risk of pushing too hard and bursting a blood vessel in your (or someone else’s) head?

For Freud the child’s gift of shit to the parents is also an expression of a child’s wish for a child. The child can’t reproduce sexually, so approximates a parthenogenesis of sorts, asexual reproduction – they give birth to the shit-baby.

It might seem banal to observe here that the blockage to the expression of one’s potential appears tied to all the shit that surrounds sexual reproduction, perhaps the very sexual nature of it. It might also seem like giving up on female desire (that crusty old topic) to imply that perhaps the only way to its expression is through some as-yet-defined asexual passage. 

Judith Butler reads gender as melancholic through Freud – as a result of certain identifications, which are tied in with primary attachments – and discusses how these are either repressed or embraced in accordance with social norms. Her logic proceeds something like this: when one is socialised into heterosexuality (and binary gender) the loss of specific homosexual attachments, or the loss of the possibility of homosexual attachments in general, is not mourned. Instead this loss gives rise to a melancholy identification. The unacknowledged loss is incorporated by the subject as an identification with that which they were not allowed to desire, thus re-enforcing a gendered identity. You become what you are not allowed to have.

Elvis’ distended bowel was linked with his drug use. Opioid induced constipation is a well-documented condition, somehow connoting lack of sensation, numbness. Less known is the narcotic bowel syndrome, a chronic pain condition resulting from it.

Maybe the masculine character of Elvis’ constipation is not limited to some specific norm about emotional expression, or the masculinity or femininity thereof, but is about something broader, his normative heterosexuality in itself. His shit is the loss made toxic by not being grieved (and it’s not just masculinity that is toxic, femininity is toxic too)

When Elvis died his body was found by his then fiancee, Ginger Alden, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Priscilla Presley. If one looks closer, it becomes obvious that the similarity is mostly down to the way both wear their hair and makeup. It’s difficult for it not to occur that this may have been something Elvis had stipulated, or at least expressed a preference for.

There is something of drag in their pronounced interpretation of femininity, the cartoonishly full long hair and the mounds of eyeliner. It is almost as if gentle fun is being poked at what a woman in inverted commas should look like, but that’s not it. This is serious. Because one presumes this was for Elvis what a woman without any inverted commas at all did look like.

In Butler’s melancholy model the subject imitates the object of their repressed desire. She understands gender as such an imitation, as an “acting out” of loss. Drag then, as an imitation of gender, is an imitation of imitation, bringing the performative character of gender to the fore for all to see. In being more femme than femme Ginger and Priscilla’s appearances are screaming out to be noticed, but still, the message doesn’t seem to be about an emancipatory play with roles, but about being trapped in one, the hard shell of hairspray imprisoning, and perhaps in some ways shielding its bearer.

One tries not to see pronounced expressions of femininity as somehow just imposed or histrionic. As violence or as wanting to please. As the violence of wanting to please. One tries because it feels misogynistic not to attribute any agency to the bearers of these expressions as much as it feels obscene to police their deployment. 

One tries yet one fails. Over and over again women become mere bearers of the mark of oppression, mere signifiers of it. You don’t want to try and penetrate their shell because really, you would just rather look away, not be reminded that you are not exempt from any of it, even if you don’t wear your loss on the outside, like a wig or mascara.

In Butler’s model gender is stabilised through heterosexual conditioning. But it occurs to me that maybe enacting that conditioning – I mean actually being in a heterosexual romantic relationship, being “in love” within that matrix – can also be a moment where one is forced to confront just how wrong and destabilising gender feels. Maybe love is the moment when the mere opiate induced constipation turns into opiate induced central hyperalgesia.

Such a love, instead of disavowal, might provide an occasion to experience the loss that underpins it. Maybe not necessarily just the loss of homosexual attachment, maybe all loss inherent to committing to one thing over another. It might force one to reencounter all previous occasions of abandonment, of abandoning and being abandoned, in the activation of the possibility of being abandoned again. 

Maybe it’s the loss of the humanity of the one you love. Maybe this is what the fantasy/horror of being interchangeable with others – made visible by ginger and priscilla – is about. 

Freud quoted Bernard Shaw saying that love is the exaggeration of the difference between one woman and another. But instead of implying an underlying sameness between potential objects of love and the distinction between them as an artifice, to me this statement just provides proof of the opposite – heterosexual romantic love as the imposition of a degree of interchangeability between one woman and another… 

… or one man and another, let’s not be fussy. 

Butler calls gender a psychic accomplishment, suggesting it’s something hard won. By this account it is presumably something you can and do fail at too. Something you can’t but fail at. 

There is no right way to be a woman, only wrong ones.