Revisiting the crossroads: can Oedipus take a gay turn in the 21st C?

Abstract

Is our foundational story of sexual identity still relevant and valid for today, or is it wrong? Oedipus has been used in the past as a cautionary tale for the consequences of transgressive sexuality, as well as an exemplar of hetero-normative development. Perhaps most influentially he has been used recently to illustrate a mechanism that underpins the concept of a pathological organization of personality, a perverse turning of a blind eye to the truth. But is this reading mistaken? In this article I return to the crossroads with Oedipus to try to give him back – for the first time – his sexual identity. By offering a re-reading of the myth in light of how we understand the impact of internalized stigma on the formation of sexual identity today I hope to show that our psychoanalytic imagination can use the Oedipus myth to encompass a range of different developmental possibilities.

Keywords:

• the law of desire
• perversion
• internalized stigma
• triangular space
• coming out

Notes

1. ^“I have found in my own case too (the phenomenon of) being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood …”

2. For extracts from the text of Sophocles’ tragedy I have relied on translations by Sir Richard Jebb (1885) and David Grene (1942) published as Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus Cambridge University Press and Sophocles, Oedipus Rex Chicago University Press, respectively; for background to the Oedipus myth I have used Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths (1955) Penguin [Folio edition, 1996].