In Chapter 2 of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler examines the contributions of Freud, Lacan, and Riviere to the construction and naturalization of heterosexuality as the normative and coherent expression of gender and sexuality. She challenges the notion of gender as a stable identity that reflects one's anatomical sex and proposes instead that gender is a performative and contingent construction that is constantly reiterated through discourse and power.
Butler begins by criticizing the structuralist approach to kinship and sexuality, exemplified by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who posits the incest taboo as the universal and transcultural law that establishes the exchange of women between men and the symbolic order of culture. She also questions the validity of the incest taboo as a natural or necessary prohibition, and suggests that it might be a retroactive effect of the heterosexual matrix rather than its origin.
She then turns to the psychoanalytic account of sexual development, focusing on Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. She argues that Freud's narrative of how a child becomes a gendered and desiring subject is based on a series of exclusions and foreclosures that produce a heterosexual outcome. She criticizes Freud for failing to account for the possibility of female agency, desire, and identification, and for reducing femininity to a lack or a wound.
Butler examines how Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud reinforces the heterosexual matrix by privileging the symbolic order of language over the imaginary order of images. She argues that Lacan's concept of the phallus as the signifier of both desire and law reproduces a patriarchal structure that marginalizes women and homosexuals. She also challenges Lacan's assumption that one's entry into language entails a necessary renunciation of one's primary attachment to the mother, and that this renunciation is constitutive of one's sexual identity.
Butler then discusses how Joan Riviere's essay "Womanliness as a Masquerade" offers a more nuanced and subversive perspective on gender performance. She contends that Riviere's notion of masquerade exposes the performativity of gender and opens up the possibility of parodying and resignifying gender norms.
Overall, this section of the chapter highlights the various perspectives on gender identifications within psychoanalytic theory and how they relate to the cultural and social prohibitions surrounding gender and sexuality. It suggests that gender identities are not fixed or deterministic, and the ways in which we identify and relate to gender are complex and multifaceted.
Furthermore, the possibility of multiple identifications suggests that the Law is not deterministic and that "the" law may not even be singular. Multiple identifications can create a non-hierarchical configuration of shifting and overlapping identifications that question the primacy of any univocal gender attribution. This means that gender complexity and dissonance can be accounted for by the multiplication and convergence of a variety of culturally dissonant identifications.
Incorporation is a fantasy of literalization or a literalizing fantasy that establishes gender identity through a refusal of loss that encrypts itself in the body and determines the living versus the dead body. The refusal of the homosexual cathexis, desire, and aim together, a refusal both compelled by social taboo and appropriated through developmental stages, results in a melancholic structure that effectively encloses that aim and object within the corporeal space or "crypt" established through an abiding denial. Heterosexual melancholy is culturally instituted and maintained as the price of stable gender identities related through oppositional desires.
Back to: Gender Trouble - chapter 1 summary
Onwards to: Gender Trouble - chapter 3 summary