Gender Trouble - Chapter 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and The Production of The Heterosexual Matrix

Chapter 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and The Production of The Heterosexual Matrix

In the second chapter of Gender Trouble, Butler takes up another commonplace of feminist theory, the patriarchy. She notes that feminists have frequently made recourse to the supposed pre-patriarchal state of culture as a model upon which to base a new, non-oppressive society. For this reason, accounts of the original transformation of sex into gender by means of the incest taboo have proven particularly useful to feminists. Butler revisits three of the most popular: Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological structuralism, in which the incest taboo necessitates a kinship structure governed by the exchange of women; Joan Riviere’s psychoanalytic description of “womanliness as a masquerade” that hides masculine identification and therefore also conceals a desire for another woman; and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic explanation of mourning and melancholia, in which loss prompts the ego to incorporate attributes of the lost loved one—in which, in other words, cathexis becomes identification. (Both Riviere and Freud center their texts on the Oedipal story (see Oedipus and Oedipus complex, a classic example of the incest taboo.)

In the course of examining these three accounts of gender identification, Butler extends them in order to emphasize the productive or performative aspects of gender. With Lévi-Strauss, she suggests that incest is “a pervasive cultural fantasy” and that the presence of the taboo generates these desires; with Riviere, she states that mimicry and masquerade form the “essence” of gender; with Freud, she asserts that “gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition” (63) and therefore that “same-sexed gender identification” (e.g., the identification of the boy with the masculine gender) depends on an unresolved (but simultaneously forgotten) homosexual cathexis (with the father, not the mother, of the Oedipal myth). For Butler, “heterosexual melancholy is culturally instituted as the price of stable gender identities” (70) and for heterosexuality to remain stable, it demands the notion of homosexuality, which remains prohibited but necessarily within the bounds of culture. Finally, Butler points again to the productivity of the incest taboo, a law which generates—and also regulates—approved heterosexuality and subversive homosexuality, neither of which exists before the law.