GENDER TROUBLE 117

Gender Trouble
explicitly argue in its favor, it would appear that the taboo against
homosexuality must precede the heterosexual incest taboo; the taboo
against homosexuality in effect creates the heterosexual “dispositions”
by which the Oedipal conflict becomes possible. The young boy and
young girl who enter into the Oedipal drama with incestuous heterosexual aims have already been subjected to prohibitions which “dispose” them in distinct sexual directions. Hence, the dispositions that
Freud assumes to be primary or constitutive facts of sexual life are
effects of a law which, internalized, produces and regulates discrete
gender identity and heterosexuality.
Far from foundational, these dispositions are the result of a process
whose aim is to disguise its own genealogy. In other words, “dispositions” are traces of a history of enforced sexual prohibitions which is
untold and which the prohibitions seek to render untellable. The narrative account of gender acquisition that begins with the postulation of
dispositions effectively forecloses the narrative point of departure
which would expose the narrative as a self-amplifying tactic of the prohibition itself. In the psychoanalytic narrative, the dispositions are
trained, fixed, and consolidated by a prohibition which later and in the
name of culture arrives to quell the disturbance created by an unrestrained homosexual cathexis.Told from the point of view which takes
the prohibitive law to be the founding moment of the narrative, the
law both produces sexuality in the form of “dispositions” and appears
disingenuously at a later point in time to transform these ostensibly
“natural” dispositions into culturally acceptable structures of exogamic
kinship. In order to conceal the genealogy of the law as productive of
the very phenomenon it later claims only to channel or repress, the
law performs a third function: Instating itself as the principle of logical
continuity in a narrative of causal relations which takes psychic facts as
its point of departure, this configuration of the law forecloses the possibility of a more radical genealogy into the cultural origins of sexuality and power relations.
What precisely does it mean to reverse Freud’s causal narrative and
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