Gender Trouble88 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 prohi
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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 het-erosexual 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 per-son and I never loved that perper-son, 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 mel-ancholy 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.”40Melancholia 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 heterosex-ual denial of homosexheterosex-uality results in melancholia and if melancholia operates through incorporation, then the disavowed homosexual love
is preserved through the cultivation of an oppositionally defined