If we think beyond Bruce Fink’s (Perversion chapter in his Clinical Introduction) notion of the neurotic’s path though alienation and separation by mapping for a sort of Discourse of the Slave Mother, we can situate mother as jouissance, father’s no, father’s name, and mother as

“Thus, claiming the womb as a site of potentiality or mothering and care for Black women may push against sexual dispossession, while performing the reification of the body as the site that confers gender becoming and its assumed appropriate capacities.” (p. 113) Douglass, P. D.

Potentiality, becoming, and capacities are rightly named. As the ruptured slave struggles in and with the mirror, fantasies of bodily integrity will pervade every discussion (especially the involuntary lens of Oedipal arrangements)

In the Discourse of the Slave Mother, the overt and manifest value of the father dramatizes the wholeness that can be achieved via (the institution of) father-mother-child and proper breeding and child rearing, though it is dramatized via failure-as-the-desire-of-the-mother

The mother’s desire, her craving, is institutionalized as "a thick substance concreting in liquors; the lees or scum concreted" and "filth, dregs" (etymonline)

Much like Antigone, the Slave Mother, is forcefully suspended “between to deaths,” the forced implantation of the father’s seed and the forced hosting of the fetus

And the slave is, additionally, forced to receive whichever gendered terms deployed by the non-slave in order (for the non-slave) to (try to) make sense of the strange situation. Put differently, gendered terms offer more information about the fantasy architecture of the

Gender is so difficult to discuss, because, via the Discourse of the Master, the divided subject’s relation to fantasy is repressed. In other words, imaginary identifications with symbolic gender are misidentified as “natural,” occurring since time immemorial. The subject is

The danger of (the institution of) gender, in this case, is the ongoing construction of a metonymic chain—that conceals the violence of gender—by way of links to plenitude (authenticity, living one’s truth, feeling embodied, coming out, etc)

This is exceptionally violent for slaves, who—whilst being violated by the institution of gender—are used by non-slaves to refine and perfect their non-slave institutionalization and commencement practices