Vicki Kirby Judith Butler: Live Theory 2006. page 33.
Crucial to Freud’s understanding of how the incest taboo actually works is the need to explain the boy’s repudiation of the mother, his primary love object. The conventional interpretation of the boy’s identification with the father rests on the fear of castration if his rivalry with the father continues. This heteronormative explanation is significantly complicated, however, when Freud concedes that perhaps an incipient bisexuality informs the child’s ambivalence towards the parents.
Butler argues that the boy is actually required to make two choices; an object choice between the mother or the father, and a choice of sexual disposition between masculine or feminine. Of course, the threat of castration becomes more ambiguous in a culture which denigrates and ‘feminizes’ the homosexual as an improper man. Given this, Butler muses in regard to the boy’s rejection of the mother, “do we construe the punishing father as a rival or as an object of desire who forbids himself as such?”
The important point here is that this fraught constellation of sexual dispositions and object choices ‘becomes the founding moment of what Freud calls gender “consolidation”.