Gender Theory 3
Freudian Psychoanalysis part III
Freud's formalism of gender identification, relying upon object-cathexis and its displacement, seems rather poor in explaining negative gender identification, or homosexuality. Furthermore, he asserts the girl's taking on femininity and maternity comes from her penis envy. (Q1) However, Judith Butler, a critical post-structural gender theorist, reformulates gender identification based upon a deeper understanding of the melancholic denial / preservation of homosexuality in the production of gender within the heterosexual frame.
Melancholia
Freud defines melancholia as, in these suffering, an object lost has been reinstated within the ego. In other words, the ego is said to incorporate that other into the very structure of the ego, taking on attributes of the other and "sustaining" the other through magical acts of imitation. In effect, the other becomes part of the ego through the permanent internalization of the other's attributes. An object-cathexis has been replaced by identification. (Q2) The most distinguishing feature of melancholia is the disturbance of self-regard. Freud interprets the self-critical attitudes of the melancholic to be the result of the internalization of a lost object of love. In cases in which an ambivalent relationship is severed through loss, that ambivalence becomes internalized as a self-critical disposition in which the role of the other is now occupied and directed by the ego itself. Then, the quarrel magically resumes as an interior dialogue between two parts of the psyche. (Q3)
Freud makes clear that the process of internalizing and sustaining lost loves is crucial to the formation of the ego and its object-choice. It is a frequent process in the early phases of development of children.
Judith Butler's Criticism of the Oedipus Complex
Judith Butler criticises Freud's conceptualization of bisexuality in terms of dispositions, feminine and masculine, a newborn baby is said to be naturally born with before any intervention of social taboos. As we reviewed in the Oedipus Complex, the masculine disposition is never oriented toward the father as an object, and neither is the feminine disposition oriented toward the mother. Hence, within Freud's thesis of primary bisexuality, there is no homosexuality, i.e., no love between masculinity and masculinity, or between femininity and femininity. Thus, Butler says Freud's bisexuality is no more than the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche. (Q4)
Melancholia of Gender by Judith Butler
Judith Butler claims Freud's notion of melancholia only alludes to gender identifications. Strictly speaking, Butler says, the giving up of the object is not a negation of the cathexis but its internalization and, hence, preservation. Since identifications substitute for object relations, and identifications are the consequence of loss, gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition. This prohibition sanctions and regulates discrete gendered identity and the law of heterosexual desire. The resolution of the Oedipus Complex affects gender identification through not only the incest taboo, but, prior to that, the taboo against homosexuality. (Q5) The result is that one identifies with the same-sexed object of love, thereby internalizing both the aim and object of the homosexual cathexis. (Q6)
Butler criticises Freud's assertion that the girl's taking on femininity and maternity comes from her penis envy or desire to find the penis in her baby's body. The mother's separation from the girl-child results in the girl's repudiation of both object (mother's body) by the incest taboo, and homosexual desire by the taboo against homosexuality. For this reason, it is a double negation Luce Irigaray calls "double wave". Thereby, the girl incorporates, and identifies with, the object lost, her mother, into the ego. Therefore, woman's femininity is constructed by melancholic identification with the mother, through double negation. Butler concludes that woman's maternity comes from the girl's incorporation of the mother as object into her ego, i.e., melancholic identification. (Q7)
Far from foundational, sexual dispositions which Freud asserts babies are born naturally with are actually 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 for their own naturalization.
Questions
Q1. Can you define masculinity or femininity? Are you sure if a police woman would be more masculine than a ballerina? Should an MTF transgender work, for example, as a fashion model, because she claimed she is a woman?
Q2. The internalization of the lost object is a strategy of the ego for psychological survival of the loss. Although, in the early essays, he understands mourning, or usual grief, to be the withdrawal of libidinal energy from the object and its displacement onto a fresh object, in the later works, Freud revises this distinction between mourning and melancholia and suggests that the internalization associated with melancholia may be the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects. When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id's loss by saying: 'Look, you can love me too-I am so like the object'. Do you agree? Is the incorporation, or internalization, the only way for our survival of any loss of the love?
Q3. Judith Butler briefly discusses the topology of the psyche in which the ego and its lost loves reside. In the act of the internalization, anger and blame, originally felt for the object in its external mode, are now turned inward and sustained, because the object in its internal mode is in the ego. As stated in Q2, this is equally applied, to some degree, for grief, or mourning. Did you ever feel you were blaming yourself when you lost a precious person?
Q4. Do you think homosexuality should be socially prohibited? Then, why? If you accept sexual minorities as members of our society, then, how will you justify your acceptance? Do you think it is unnatural or violating the universal principle? If you think it is natural, then, why do you think so?
Q5. Heterosexual Matrix: Do you agree with Butelr in that heterosexual basis precedes, or is prior to, exogamic basis in the Western society? Specifically, in child education, do you find any evidence of the taboo against homosexuality?
Q6. Further, this identity is constructed and maintained by the consistent application of the taboo against homosexuality, not only in the stylization of the body but in the production and "disposition" of sexual desire. Did you ever imagine that, when you stylize your hair and body, you are actually following an injunction of a microprocessor installed-by social prohibition-on the head which presumes an original desire, "disposition"? For instance, such a command: "You are a woman. Dress in a womanly way!"
Q7. But, still, from the context of sociobiology and Darwinism, maternity can be regarded as a cultural continuation of biological instinct for maximizing genetic proliferation. For instance, those insane high education fevers shown by East Asian moms and, today even many Western moms, to send their children to Harvard or Juliard particularly seem to strengthen sociobiological implications. Which do you agree? Butler or sociobiology?
Works Cited
Butler, J., Gender Trouble, Routledge 2006, p78
Freud, S., The Ego and the Id, pp29-30
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916), p244
Freud, S., The Ego and the Id, p31
Butler, J., Gender Trouble, Routledge 2006, pp85-86
Butler, J., Gender Trouble, Routledge 2006, pp114-115
Freud, S., The Ego and the Id, pp
Butler, J., Gender Trouble, Routledge 2006, pp86
I hope to see you all at the meeting,
Kyu Don
© 2011, Kyu-don Choi