Category: incest

Gender refuses a loss

JB, Gender Trouble. 1990. page 60.

Boys repudiation of the mother is the founding moment of what Freud calls gender “consolidation”

Forfeiting the mother as object of desire, the boy either internalizes the loss through identification with her, or displaces his heterosexual attachment, in which case he fortifies his attachment to his father and thereby “consolidates” his masculinity. As the metaphor of consolidation suggests, there are clearly bits and pieces of masculinity to be found within the psychic landscape, dispositions, sexual trends, and aims, but they are diffuse and disorganized, unbounded by the exclusivity of a heterosexual object choice. Indeed, if the boy renounces both aim and object and, therefore, heterosexual cathexis altogether, he internalizes the mother and sets up a feminine superego which dissolves and disorganizes masculinity, consolidating feminine libidinal dispositions in its place (60).

Gender as an identity refusal of a loss (the maternal body) that encrypts itself in the body

antimetaphorical activity, incorporation LITERALIZES the loss ON or IN the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear “sex” as its literal truth (68).

Melancholia

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).