GENDER TROUBLE 124

Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Heterosexual Matrix
der identity. In other words, disavowed male homosexuality culminates in a heightened or consolidated masculinity, one which maintains
the feminine as the unthinkable and unnameable.The acknowledgment
of heterosexual desire, however, leads to a displacement from an original to a secondary object, precisely the kind of libidinal detachment
and reattachment that Freud affirms as the character of normal grief.
Clearly, a homosexual for whom heterosexual desire is unthinkable
may well maintain that heterosexuality through a melancholic structure
of incorporation, an identification and embodiment of the love that is
neither acknowledged nor grieved. But here it becomes clear that the
heterosexual refusal to acknowledge the primary homosexual attachment is culturally enforced by a prohibition on homosexuality which is
in no way paralleled in the case of the melancholic homosexual. In
other words, heterosexual melancholy is culturally instituted and maintained as the price of stable gender identities related through oppositional desires.
But what language of surface and depth adequately expresses this
incorporating effect of melancholy? A preliminary answer to this question is possible within the psychoanalytic discourse, but a fuller understanding will lead in the last chapter to a consideration of gender as an
enactment that performatively constitutes the appearance of its own
interior fixity. At this point, however, the contention that incorporation
is a fantasy suggests that the incorporation of an identification is a fantasy of literalization or a literalizing fantasy.41 Precisely by virtue of its
melancholic structure, this literalization of the body conceals its genealogy and offers itself under the category of “natural fact.”
What does it mean to sustain a literalizing fantasy? If gender differentiation follows upon the incest taboo and the prior taboo on homosexuality, then “becoming” a gender is a laborious process of becoming
naturalized, which requires a differentiation of bodily pleasures and
parts on the basis of gendered meanings. Pleasures are said to reside in
the penis, the vagina, and the breasts or to emanate from them, but such
descriptions correspond to a body which has already been constructed
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