GENDER TROUBLE 123

Gender Trouble
homosexuality, but in the case of the heterosexual incest taboo through
which heterosexual identity is established, the loss is borne as grief. In
the case of the prohibition against homosexual incest through which
heterosexual identity is established, however, the loss is sustained
through a melancholic structure. The loss of the heterosexual object,
argues Freud, results in the displacement of that object, but not the heterosexual aim; on the other hand, the loss of the homosexual object
requires the loss of the aim and the object. In other words, the object is
not only lost, but the desire fully denied, such that “I never lost that person and I never loved that person, indeed never felt that kind of love at
all.” The melancholic preservation of that love is all the more securely
safeguarded through the totalizing trajectory of the denial.
Irigaray’s argument that in Freud’s work the structures of melancholy and of developed femininity are very similar refers to the
denial of both object and aim that constitutes the “double wave” of
repression characteristic of a fully developed femininity. For Irigaray, it
is the recognition of castration that initiates the young girl into “a
‘loss’ that radically escapes any representation.”40 Melancholia is thus a
psychoanalytic norm for women, one that rests upon her ostensible
desire to have the penis, a desire which, conveniently, can no longer be
felt or known.
Irigaray’s reading, full of mocking citations, is right to debunk the
developmental claims regarding sexuality and femininity that clearly
pervade Freud’s text. As she also shows, there are possible readings of
that theory that exceed, invert, and displace Freud’s stated aims.
Consider that the refusal of the homosexual cathexis, desire and aim
together, a refusal both compelled by social taboo and appropriated
through developmental stages, results in a melancholic structure
which effectively encloses that aim and object within the corporeal
space or “crypt” established through an abiding denial. If the heterosexual denial of homosexuality results in melancholia and if melancholia
operates through incorporation, then the disavowed homosexual love
is preserved through the cultivation of an oppositionally defined gen88