Psychoanalysis and raising a daughter

Preface: It is 5:54 a.m. I have been awake since about 4:30. There is no point in trying to sleep anymore, so now I am up and not happy about it. Not RB's fault, just too many thoughts. So here are some of them.

I've been reading Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love, and of course, it is troubling me. As it should. I am always upset when I read psychoanalytic theory, even the feminist revisions of it. Benjamin addresses women's desires and lack of subjectivity--men desire, women are desired. She takes on both Oedipal theory and indentification theory and proposes that girls and boys need to be able to feel comfortable identifying with mother and father at different times before they develop their own sense of gender identity in order to avoid this subject-object problem in later relationships. Girls percieve the woman as submissive and lacking subjectivity, while the father has power, subjectivity in his own desire, and access to the outside world. So as a girl tries to seperate herself from her mother she turns to the father, and later the "ideal lover," as the ones who can provide her access to worlds closed off to her--she can possess desire by being close to their desire. Okay. I follow. But what about my daughter?

The distribution of work along gender lines is pretty conventional at my house. I am RB's primary caregiver and the one who manages the running of the household. I do most of the domestic labor, and my husband is absent a lot because of his work hours (that is getting better right now, but it goes in phases). So for RB, she will likely see Mom as the nurturer located mostly in the home, serving the family, while Dad is the one out in the world doing exciting things and coming home to play--what fun Dad is! But I don't think that out interaction when we are all home together would reflect a dominant-submissive relationship. I don't think that I am demonstrating to my daughter that I do not possess my own desires. In fact, a great many decisions in our family, including the city we live in, are based on my career ambitions. My career is a priority in our family, and RB will see that as she grows up. But I don't think she sees it now, and now is the time that the psychoanalysts are so concerned with. But reading Benjamin's conclusion, there's not much point in my worrying over this because the cultural ideals of "father" and "mother" are going to exist with or without me, and we need a total rethinking of gender polarity.

I really think that our cultural assumptions have changed enough to allow for women with subjectivity. But the very existence of the Victoria's Secret catalogue promotes an ideal image of woman, not desiring but making herself desirable--object, not subject. I think my husband and I can be good models for our daughter so that she can grow up with a sense that she has the right to possess her desires, but how do I know I'm doing it right?

I have taken comfort in one thing lately. Benjamin proposes identificatory love for both parents as the healthy way for toddlers to develop gender identity and uses as examples children wanting to wear parents' clothes. RB walks puts on her dad's shoes and says, "Daddy's shoes!" and other times wears my shoes saying, "Mommy's shoes!" For now, I'm going to call that identificatory love and believe that I am showing my daughter how to be a woman who knows her desires and demands to be a subject.