Lloyd, Moya. Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 2007.
According to Lévi-Strauss there is a universal law that regulates the exchange of women in all kinship systems: this is the incest taboo, which ensures that women are exchanged between clans of men not related by blood. The incest taboo is crucial in two ways
1. it generates a non-incestuous heterosexuality
2. the taboo represents the crucial step in the transition from nature to culture. It inaugurates society. … the taboo leads to compulsory heterosexuality. How?
It divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners and it presupposes a prior less articulate taboo on homosexuality. Incest taboo = invariant transcultural symbolic law
Because Rubin believes all humans are sexually polymorphous, she adheres to an idea of ‘sexuality “before the law”‘ rather than as Butler would have it, sexuality as an effect of the law (81).
… it is clear that much of the conceptual apparatus Butler deploys in her own analysis of Lévi-Strauss, Freud and Lacan is borrowed from Rubin’s earlier text: her assumption of a prior prohibition on homosexuality, an understanding of heterosexuality as compulsory and a concern with the intractability of symbolic law (81).
In Freud’s estimation, all infants experience incestuous desires for their parents. How these desires are resolved determines not only the subject’s future sexual orientation but also how its ego and superego (conscience) develop.
Key to Freud’s account, according to Butler, is the idea of primary bisexuality. Freud assumes, that is, that all babies are born with both feminine and masculine dispositions… A masculine disposition, he suggests, is expressed in the child’s desire for its mother, while a feminine disposition is expressed in the child’s desire for its father. The sex of the child in question is irrelevant.
For Butler this can mean only one thing. Freud understands primary bisexuality heteronormatively: as ‘the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche’ (Butler Gender Trouble 77 cited in Lloyd 83).
Why is Freud unable to imagine the possibility of pre-oedipal homosexuality? Butler’s supposition (echoing Rubin) is that the reason for this is that the Oedipus complex, and thus Freud’s theory of psycho-sexual development, presumes a prior prohibition on homosexuality.
In order to expose this prior prohibition, Butler set about demonstrating that far from masculinity and femininity being dispositions that naturally inhere in persons, they are, in fact, effects of identification.
Identification refers to the process whereby the individual acquires its identity, or aspects thereof, from someone (or something) else. One of the ways in which this occurs is through … introjection.
Introjection: is when the subject takes into its ego —into him or herself— objects from the outside world in order to preserve them. Introjection is a response to loss.