Articulating the social body: Psychoanalysis, sexual difference, and queer sexualities.

摘要

This dissertation draws heavily on the work of Sigmund Freud and of contemporary feminist and lesbian, bisexual and gay theorists in order to rethink the interdependence of gender and sexuality in psychoanalytic theory and Western literary and cultural productions since the late nineteenth century.;The first four chapters deal with gay male desire and the constitution of the modern socius. Both Freud and Luce Irigaray narrate a mythology of a male homosexuality at the "origin" of sociality. For Irigaray it permeates the symbolic as the specularizing logic of a male phallocentric imaginary. For both theorists, heterosexuality functions as a belated cultural achievement, overlaying and (barely) concealing the economy of male homoeroticism that subtends it. These theoretical considerations introduce detailed readings of works by Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Rider Haggard, E. M. Forster and Andre Gide, in which the reading of the epistemological "trauma" of male homosexuality is aligned with an analysis of the operations of commodity fetishism and colonial fantasy.;The second four chapters center the issues of lesbian desire and female and feminist sociality. Lesbian desire has been pathologized as psychotic--that is, inarticulate, pre-symbolic, pre- and violently anti-social--in psychoanalytic theory and practice. This tendency persists in some feminist theory: most notably that of Julia Kristeva. At other times, lesbian desire is evacuated of its symbolic import in order to enable it to function as a utopian figure in feminist theorization. This theoretical introduction is followed by detailed readings of works by Jean Genet, Radclyffe Hall, and Mary Wings. The question of the articulation of lesbianism within the social symbolic and its "visibilization" within the scopic regime of modernity is traced through considerations of domesticity, corporality in its relationship to community and communitarian doctrine, and the paranoid operation of the "voyure" as it informs questions of identity and identification in a lesbian detective novel.