Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix The straight mind continues to affirm that incest, and not homosexuality represents its major interdiction.Thu
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Prohibition, Psychoanalysis,
and the Production
of the Heterosexual Matrix
The straight mind continues to affirm that incest, and not homosexuality represents its major interdiction.Thus, when thought by the straight
mind, homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality.
—Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind”
On occasion feminist theory has been drawn to the thought of an origin,
a time before what some would call “patriarchy” that would provide an imaginary perspective from which to establish the contingency of the history of women’s oppression Debates have emerged over whether prepatriarchal cultures have existed, whether they were matriarchal or matrilineal in structure, whether patriarchy could be shown to have a beginning and, hence, be subject to an end.The critical impetus behind these kinds of inquiry sought understandably to show that the antifemi-nist argument in favor of the inevitability of patriarchy constituted a
reification and naturalization of a historical and contingent phenomenon.
Although the turn to a prepatriarchal state of culture was intended
to expose the self-reification of patriarchy, that prepatriarchal scheme has proven to be a different sort of reification More recently, some feminists have offered a reflexive critique of some reified constructs within feminism itself The very notion of “patriarchy” has threatened
to become a universalizing concept that overrides or reduces distinct
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