Sexual Essentialism

Sexual Essentialism, as Zupančič deploys the term in What Is Sex?, names the ideological operation that occurs when sexual difference is relocated from the register of the Real to the ontological plane of fixed essences. When psychoanalysis attempts to defend the irreducibility of sex by grounding it in ontology — anchoring masculinity and femininity as stable, combinable essences — it paradoxically achieves the opposite of its intent: it neutralizes sex's disruptive force by transforming it into a secure metaphysical foundation. The result is a "combinatory game of essences," a system in which the two sexes become positive substances whose properties can be enumerated, arranged, and distributed, rather than positions defined by their constitutive incompleteness and failure.

This is the precise trap Zupančič warns against. For Lacan, sexual difference is not an ontological given but a maeontological one — it belongs to the register of the Real as non-relation, as irreducible negativity, not as the positive presence of two complementary natures. Sexual Essentialism thus represents the domestication of the Lacanian Real of sex into the Imaginary register of identifiable essences — a slide that, in Zupančič's argument, is structurally parallel to the replacement of "sexual difference" by "gender," insofar as both moves drain sex of its ontological scandal by rendering it representable, classifiable, and ideologically manageable.

The concept appears at a pivotal argumentative juncture in what-is-sex-alenka-zupancic, where Zupančič maps the dangers awaiting psychoanalytic discourse from both directions: on one side, the liberal-gender replacement of sex with socially constructed identity (linked to the cross-ref'd concept of Identity, where identity is always an ideological product that substitutes an image of wholeness for structural self-division); on the other side, the defensive over-ontologization that produces Sexual Essentialism. The latter is directly connected to Ideology as theorized in the corpus: by offering sex a positive ontological ground, the essentialist move performs precisely the fantasmatic supplementation that ideology requires — papering over the constitutive antagonism (the non-relation of the sexes) with the fiction of complementary essences. It also bears on Lack and Maeontology: the Lacanian position insists that sexual difference is constituted through lack, through what does not work in the Real, not through the presence of two self-sufficient natures. Sexual Essentialism, by contrast, fills in that lack, liquidating the maeontological (non-being, absence as ontologically operative) dimension that Zupančič foregrounds as essential to psychoanalysis's distinctive contribution.

The cross-ref'd concept of Contradiction is equally at stake: Sexual Essentialism resolves the internal contradiction that defines each sexed position (as formalized in Lacan's formulas of sexuation) into a harmonious combinatory system, erasing the antinomial structure that makes sex politically and theoretically explosive. Similarly, Foreclosure haunts the concept negatively: what Sexual Essentialism forecloses is not a signifier but the Real of the non-relation itself — by symbolizing sex as essence, the irreducible Real is banished from the discourse. The concept thus functions in Zupančič's argument as a cautionary limit-case, identifying the point at which the defence of psychoanalytic orthodoxy collapses into the very desexualization of reality it was meant to oppose.

What Is Sex?Alenka Zupančič · 2017 (p.48)

Fortified on the ontological level, sexual difference is strongly anchored in essentialism—it becomes a combinatory game of the essences of masculinity and femininity.

The phrase "combinatory game of essences" is theoretically decisive: it shows how an ostensibly strong, ontologically "fortified" position actually neutralizes sex by turning the irreducible Real of sexual non-relation into a positive, manageable system — the very move that, for Zupančič, is indistinguishable in its effects from the liberal gender discourse it claims to oppose. "Fortified" carries ironic weight, indicating that the defensive ontological move produces not strength but a new vulnerability.