In this respect, there is hardly anything new to the claim that the pinning is multiple, that its modalities and purposes have varied according to the uses and values, agendas and intentions of the gendered individual to whom they belong. However, the multiplicity that Cixous’s text points to, the one I would like to carry further, has as much to do with the locations and purposes of the pinning as it does with its intensities and qualities.

        The psychoanalytic discourse on identity has been enmeshed with the heading and perspective of gender difference at the expense of all others. The world of a Rome to which all the political roads led, of a heavenly deity at which all redemptive supplications were directed, of an absolute knowledge to which all scientific inquiries aspired, and of a primary dynamic around which all bodily desires were organized, that is a world that is no longer ours, assuming, indeed, that it ever was. Rome, God, Truth, and Oedipus have long since been unseated from their respective thrones. In their stead, we recognize not so much the radical absence of any singular organisational principle, for the claim to such an absence itself is singular and principled, but the simultaneous and incessant pull of a number of hubs and coordinates around which our practices have come to be organized. In its hay day, Rome may have wished itself the sole centre of power and commerce; the fact of the wish itself speaks of an altogether different reality. Moreover, the empire has long since been displaced by a number of others, including itself under an unfamiliar and not entirely favourable guise; as much can be said of God, Truth, and Oedipus. Of this we can be certain: no contender to a throne is without a match, and no throne is everlasting. Sexual difference has often claimed for itself the primary, indomitable, and matchless ground upon which are erected psyche, soma, and, by extension, the channels via which these two have communicated. It has arrogated for itself the title of queen and has condemned any questioning of its primacy and supremacy as enmity, folly, betrayal, or misguided-ness. This has been the case for psychoanalysis as much as for feminism.

        In the face of such despotism, one could advocate the overthrow of the powers that be in favour of a presumably more inclusive or even egalitarian structure that would accommodate the various bodily markers as legitimate sites of psychological identifications, differentiations, and alliances. One could then argue that disability, and lack thereof, is potentially as constitutive of the unconscious and its dynamics as is gender. In its early years, a visually impaired or hard of hearing child, for instance, is as liable to endure the presence and absence of sight or sound as much as, if not more than, that of the penis. In a familial triangle marked by such a dynamic, the traffic in identification and ambivalence is shaped as much by the fact that some can see or hear while others can’t as it is by the fact that some have a penis while others don’t.

        The triangle is hence as much a triangle of ability as it is one of sex and gender. With some modification, the argument could also be extended to show how the same triangle is, at times, equally a triangle of race for instance. Any body part that is available for the child as a site of differentiation between self and other is hence potentially yet another site of pinning and triangulation. It is in this much more fundamental sense that the pinning of psyche to soma is synchronically multiple; its locations are not limited to the erogenous zones; they can and, as is becoming increasingly evident, they very often do include most organs, limbs, senses, and skins.