Notes from JB’s Gender Trouble 1990, Routledge
little effort has been made so far to look at the melancholic denial/preservation of homosexuality in the production of gender within the heterosexual frame (57).
melancholia does not oppose the work of mourning
identification
incest taboo: internalizes the tabooed object of desire, in prohibited heterosexual union object is denied but not modality of desire
prohibited homosexual union: both desire and object of desire require renunciation and so become subject to internalizing strategies of melancholia
Freud cites bisexual dispositions which should mean that an original sexual love of son for father should not be denied but Freud denies this.
The boy however does sustain a primary cathexis for the mother
That the boy usually chooses the heterosexual would, then, be the result, not of the fear of castration by the father, but of the fear of castration — that is, the fear of “feminization” associated within heterosexual cultures with male homosexuality. In effect, it is not primarily the heterosexual lust for the mother that must be punished and sublimated, but the homosexual cathexis that must be subordinated to a cultually sanctioned heterosexuality (59).
The melancholic refuses the loss of the object and internalization becomes a strategy of magically resuscitating the lost object, not only because the loss is painful, but because the ambivalence felt towards the object requires that the object be retained until differences are settled (61).