A Critique of Queer Phenomenology: Gender and the Sexual

ABSTRACT

This article critiques Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology in light of psychoanalytic theory of sexuality. I argue that there is a conspicuous absence of the unconscious, sexuality, and fantasy in Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. I turn to the work of Jean Laplanche both to address this absence and to argue for a theory of the formation of sexuality and gender that is not exhausted by the phenomenal world.

Notes

¹ It is important to note that Laplanche marks his departure from Freud through his theoretical separation from the Oedipus Complex. He argues that there is more to identification than the Oedipus Complex through which one parent becomes the sexual object and the other becomes the rival: “The sexual is the unconscious residue of the repression/symbolization of gender by sex” (Laplanche, 2007, p. 202). The identification of the child with the parental other has to do with the way in which others embody femininity or masculinity as their gender. Thus, for Laplanche, gender precedes sex but not the development of sexuality and its organization.

² Freud’s theory of seduction (1895–1897) placed the memory of a real scene of seduction in a central role to psychoneuroses. Seduction described a moment when the child was sexually seduced by an adult by words, gestures, or physical advances that the child experiences passively, in a state of fright and lack of understanding. For Laplanche, Freud’s theory of seduction was an attempt to account for repression. This theory suggests that trauma occurs in two moments. The first moment is the act of seduction experienced passively by the child. The second moment is when any event happens to revive the memory of seduction, which leads to the first repression of the memory. Later, Freud discovered that many scenes of seduction were not literal past experiences but fantasies. Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory in 1897 is often seen as the beginning of his actual theory of sexuality.

³ See Ruth Stein’s “Moments in Laplanche’s Theory of Sexuality” (2007) and Judith Butler’s “Seduction, Gender and the Drive” (2014).

⁴ Fantasy denotes a specific imaginary production that exceeds imaginative activity precisely because in the psychoanalytic sense this term blurs the distinction between reality and imagination, truth and fiction. Even fantasies have psychic reality.

⁵ Laplanche accords seduction priority over fantasy even though seduction itself can be a fantasy. Seduction as a fantasy and the events of potential seduction cannot be easily distinguished. In other words, the reality of seduction cannot be reduced to the fact that an adult has or has not seduced the child. Thus, the priority assigned to seduction “is based on the fact that the other scenarios invoked as primal have seduction as their nucleus, to the extent that they too convey messages from the other, always at first in the direction from adult to child” (Laplanche, 1999, p. 173). External others guarantee the formation of the unconscious in the child (the internal other). The external and internal are heuristic terms to emphasize the adult–child relationship and the fact that the unconscious is formed by others in/through seduction.

⁶ The work of Judith Butler has been heavily criticized, initially for her distinction of sex and gender (see, e.g., Toril Moi’s 1999 What is a Woman?) and later for her theory of performativity and use of femininity and masculinity after criticizing them for being ideological constructs. See, for example, Joan Copjec’s Read my Desire (2015) where she critiques Butler’s historicist account of sexuality. She argues that Butler operates with binaries that always make gender in the process of discursive construction. Whatever the merits of the critiques of Butler, they are outside of the scope of this article.

⁷ Ahmed’s theory of sexual orientation draws from Judith Butler and echoes Butler’s argument that gender performativity retrospectively creates the illusion of the existence of an inner gender. It is important, however, to briefly mention their differences. For Butler, as argued in Gender Trouble and The Psychic Life of Power, it would be inaccurate to reduce the psychic workings of gender to its performativity. What gender is, for Butler, cannot be derived from its performance whether or not performance is compulsory. Moreover, Butler argues that gender and sexuality can never be reduced to their performativity because she does not lose sight of the unconscious.

⁸ It is worth noting that Ahmed is operating in a long tradition of feminist theory that has rightly criticized Freud on multiple fronts—for arguing that the libido is masculine, for equating passivity with femininity, or for his theory of penis envy, to name a few.

⁹ Quoted in Hsieh (2012, p. 106).

¹⁰ The work of many authors, such as Theodor Adorno, has shown that the family, as the locus of sexual development, is not a neutral and closed circle. The family, in whatever particular historical formation, depends on social processes and not on the father’s wishes and dreams. In fact, as Adorno (1972) has pointed out in Aspects of Sociology, in our present conditions, the child can very quickly see that the father by no means possess the power and goodness that the child expected. The father is weak in our society. This can lead to an inability to identify with the father and familial expectations, as well as to a disillusionment with our abilities to meet expectations such as reproduction.

¹¹ For Laplanche transference is not confined to the psychoanalytic situation but can also occur in cultural and artistic productions.

¹² It is significant to point out that Michel Foucault’s (1990) The History of Sexuality is a seminal text in feminist theory and queer theory. Foucault famously argued that sexuality, unlike what Freud claims, is not repressed; rather, there is an incitement to bring sexuality into the focus, to produce discourse around it, and to control it. Sexuality is everywhere and we speak about it all the time. Alenka Zupančič (2016) has rightly criticized Foucault’s account of Freud’s theory of sexuality and the absence of the unconscious in The History of Sexuality. Zupančič points out that the unconscious for Freud is significant not just because of what is repressed but also because of what is discharged. In other words, the unconscious is not simply the passive opposite of the conscious.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeta Mulaj

Jeta Mulaj is a philosophy doctoral candidate at DePaul University. She is currently finishing her dissertation, entitled Reclaiming Stability. She is also the founder and director of the Balkan Society for Theory and Practice, based in Kosovo.