GENDER TROUBLE 104

Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Heterosexual Matrix
essential sign. Indeed, her account presupposes the primacy of aggression over sexuality, the desire to castrate and take the place of the masculine subject, a desire avowedly rooted in a rivalry, but one which, for
her, exhausts itself in the act of displacement. But the question might
usefully be asked: What sexual fantasy does this aggression serve, and
what sexuality does it authorize? Although the right to occupy the
position of a language user is the ostensible purpose of the analysand’s
aggression, we can ask whether there is not a repudiation of the feminine that prepares this position within speech and which, invariably,
reemerges as the Phallic-Other that will phantasmatically confirm the
authority of the speaking subject?
We might then rethink the very notions of masculinity and femininity constructed here as rooted in unresolved homosexual cathexes.
The melancholy refusal/domination of homosexuality culminates in
the incorporation of the same-sexed object of desire and reemerges in
the construction of discrete sexual “natures” that require and institute
their opposites through exclusion. To presume the primacy of bisexuality or the primary characterization of the libido as masculine is still
not to account for the construction of these various “primacies.” Some
psychoanalytic accounts would argue that femininity is based in the
exclusion of the masculine, where the masculine is one “part” of a
bisexual psychic composition. The coexistence of the binary is
assumed, and then repression and exclusion intercede to craft discretely gendered “identities” out of this binary, with the result that
identity is always already inherent in a bisexual disposition that is,
through repression, severed into its component parts. In a sense, the
binary restriction on culture postures as the precultural bisexuality
that sunders into heterosexual familiarity through its advent into “culture.” From the start, however, the binary restriction on sexuality
shows clearly that culture in no way postdates the bisexuality that it
purports to repress: It constitutes the matrix of intelligibility through
which primary bisexuality itself becomes thinkable. The “bisexuality”
that is posited as a psychic foundation and is said to be repressed at a
69