A neo-Foucauldian analysis allows for interpretations which do not presupppose a split between the psychic and the socio-historical and cultural. It addresses how her narrative and identity have been shaped by a number of discourses: religious (Catholic), psychoanalytic (the notion of her son’s homosexuality as being ‘caused’ by his relationship with her), and those relating to gender in which masculinity is characterized as dominant, women’s sexuality is deemed threatening (particularly at the time at which Teresa was growing up), and which designate heterosexual desire as natural. Foucault (1976) traces how, historically, same-sex sexuality has been deemed unnatural, sinful, and pathological. He argues that there is no body prior to history or to discourse; it is ‘produced’ by and saturated with historical forces. Power is transmitted through discourses and practices relating to sexuality, producing culturally specific identities. It includes those such as lesbian and gay identities whose power arises as forms of resistance to a dominant discourse. Designations of the body and of sexuality as, for example, ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ are therefore not factual, biological distinctions; they are interpretations which arise from the dominant discourses of subjectivity of the time, whether religious, medical, pedagogic, psychoanalytic etc.
Teresa’s homophobia might be conceptualized as a ‘condensation’ (to use Freud’s term) of these discourses. But this is not to assume that this condensation is static or to deny the individuality of her experience. Is a neo-Foucauldian analysis sufficient for addressing Teresa’s experiences in the analytical relationship or for an analysis of the operations of homophobia in more general terms?
Homophobia and Melancholia
Through her marriage of Freud’s and Foucault’s work Judith Butler argues for an integration of the concept (not used by Foucault) of the ‘psychic’ with his analysis of discursive practices and the operations of power. Her project concerns the question of how to theorize the subject’s incorporation of social norms without assuming a pre-existent split between internal and external realities. Butler proposes that the foreclosure of homosexual desire is foundational to heterosexuality from the beginning of life. Since the loss of a person of a similar gender whom one has loved cannot be acknowledged, it cannot be mourned, ‘‘I have never loved’ someone of a similar gender and ‘I have never lost’ any such person’ (Butler 1997: 23). As Freud describes it, the inability to mourn results in melancholia. Since the foreclosure of homosexual love is ‘the condition of possibility for social existence’ (Butler 1997: p.24) heterosexuality is, Butler argues, permeated with melancholy: it is predicated on an unmourned loss. This is not the loss of an attachment that has been made and then disavowed. The form of the attachment has itself been structured through foreclosure, a ‘mourning for unlived possibilities’ (Butler 1997: 139). The girl acquires her gender through the repudiation of her desire for her mother and the positioning of her as a prohibited object in a melancholic identification. The boy’s gender identity heterosexually is achieved by his repudiation of the feminine: his desire for the feminine is scarred by this such that he ‘wants the woman he would never be’ (Butler 1997: 137). The more virulently he defends his ‘masculinity’ the more accentuated is his melancholy in relation to the loss of the possibility of homosexual desire. This, she argues, is inevitable where there is no public recognition of the loss which might allow it to be fully grieved. Butler does not assume that melancholia in relation to gender and sexual identifications is limited to heterosexuals; where these are rigidly established for lesbians and gay men there is also the loss of heterosexual possibilities.
Butler presents a developmental account of heterosexual subjectivity but she does not make claims for its universality. Through Foucault, her theorizing challenges reliance on ahistorical notions of drives and repression, arguing instead that sexualities are ‘produced’. However, diverging from Foucault and reinstalling the notion of the psychic, Butler attempts to explore the meaning for the subject of the prohibition against homosexuality, through Freud’s theorizing of melancholia. She emphasizes that the repudiation she describes is not necessary to psychic survival and argues instead for the mobility and fluidity of identifications.