The masculine and feminine are not dispositions but accomplishments
Accomplishments which emerge in tandem with the achievement of heterosexuality. Here Freud articulates a cultural logic whereby gender is achieved and stabilized through heterosexual positioning, and where threats to heterosexuality thus become threats to gender itself. 135
Hence the fear of homosexual desire in a woman may induce a panic that she is losing her femininity, that she is not a woman, that she is no longer a proper woman, that if she is not quite a man, she is like one, and hence monstrous in some way. Or in a man, the terror of homosexual desire may lead to a terror of being construed as feminine, feminized, of no longer being properly a man, of being a “failed” man, or being in some sense a figure of monstrosity or abjection. 136
Consider that gender is acquired at least in part through the repudiation of homosexual attachments; the girl becomes a girl through being subject to a prohibition which bars the mother as an object of desire and installs that barred object as a part of the ego, indeed, as a melancholic identification. Thus the identification contains within it both the prohibition and the desire, and so embodies the ungrieved loss of the homosexual cathexis. If one is a girl to the extent that one does not want a girl, then wanting a girl will bring being a girl into question; within this matrix, homosexual desire thus panics gender. 136
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Jay, Meg. “”Individual Differences in Melancholy Gender Among Women: Does Ambivalence Matter?” Journal of the Am erican Psychoanal Assoc 2007; 55; 1279
Drawing most closely from Freud’s theory of melancholy, she argued that, because these losses are unrecognized in a heterosexual culture, they can never be mourned, leading to unresolved grief and a melancholic identification with the same-sex lost object. To Butler, gender is that melancholic identification. To put it simply, we are what we cannot have, in that we settle for being personally what we cannot have sexually. Femininity and masculinity are the funeral garb we wear in tribute to our lost homoerotic possibilities.
To Butler, gender is that melancholic identification. In a heterosexual culture, “we are what we cannot have” as we settle for being personally what we cannot have sexually: men cling to a masculine identification because they lose their chance for experiencing erotic love for other men and women take on femininity because they cannot experience erotic love for other women. 117 Jay 2007a
Indeed, classical and contemporary psychoanalytic theory have noted that the path toward sexual and gender identification is different for males and females because the pre-oedipal primary attachment is homosexual for girls and heterosexual for boys. (1285 2007)