Queer Theory, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Sexual Politics From Norm to Desire

Valle Junior, Luiz (2024) Queer Theory, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Sexual Politics From Norm to Desire. Routledge, Oxford, United Kingdom, pp. 30-60. ISBN 9781032543819 (In Press)

Abstract

This chapter considers one of the foundational documents of queer theory, which is also, to this day, one of the most important readings of Lacan in the field: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. It reconstructs Butler’s performative theory of gender and sexual identity and the critique they propose to the effect that Lacanian psychoanalysis is patriarchal and heteronormative in its emphasis on symbolic structure and its borrowings from structural anthropology. It argues that, while Butler is correct to see Lacan’s account of the phallus as partly patriarchal and heteronormative, their reading of ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ is partial in respect of Lacanian theory in the mid-to-late 1950s and in respect of the progression of Lacanian theory over the late 1950s and early 1960s. Properly construed, the chapter argues, the phallus and its holder, the father, are not signifiers to cultural norms, but subjective solutions to a deeper problem than normativity. There is, then, scope to separate out the father as a heteronormative political technology and the phallus as the index of that problem, delineated already at the level of the earliest infant-caretaker situation. This discussion already exists in Lacan’s 1950s work. This chapter reconstructs it.

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