Lacan v. Gender Pt. 1

The writing of Jacques Lacan relies heavily upon word play as a tactic for destratifying an ostensibly ossified linguistic landscape. The fundamental power of language lies in its ability to transmit, i.e. language always functions as a conduit, a viaduct if you will. Within Lacan's work, the structural aspects of language, when applied to the Freudian concept of the 'unconscious,' allows for a 'decoding' of the desiring subject via the subject's use of language. The structure of the unconscious is assumed to mimic the structure of Sausserian linguistics, which thereby provides the necessary key to decrypt the linguistic cipher which enshrouds the signifying subject. In this view, the individual unconscious unveils itself through the significations of the individual (as opposed to the signifying act).
When first encountering Irigaray (a student of Lacan's) translated into English, it becomes apparent that the French language is lacking something quite prevalent within the English-speaking academic landscape, namely a concept of "gender" separated from a concept of "sex." During the time of Lacan's work, the Francophone world had not yet developed a differentiated concept of gender. The term "genre," from which the English language derives the term "gender," refers to gender solely in a linguistic sense, i.e. as in the differentiation between a masculine and feminine noun. The English term "gender" is rendered in French as "sexe," which is also the term used to signify the English term "sex." Any notion of performativity within the concept of genre is thus foreclosed, as the term remains solely indicative of the "gender" status of a linguistic utterance. Based upon these structures, one may construct two rudimentary "strict" sets:

The French Set:
[M, F] - sexe
The English Set:
[Mm, Mf
Fm, Ff] - sex/gender

where M signifies what biologically is termed XY, F XX, m the masculine production of values and behaviours and f its feminine counterpart. Obviously, the English set provides a more furtile ground for the production of concepts, as its second-level contains 16 permutations versus the four permutations of the French set. The potential continuum within which one may theoretically operate vis-a-vis sex/gender thus varies significantly between the Anglophone and Francophone world (we will take a ^2 power operation to be more than adequate for this characterization). (Of course, it will be remarked that the preceding biological characterization is itself reductive, omitting the XXY, as only the most obvious of faults. This assault is valid, but for the sake of simplicity we will forgo this criticism, which action we hope the subsequent arguments will vindicate).