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ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu increasingly engaged psychoanalytic concepts in his work throughout his life. However, he focussed his analysis on the social causes of psychic processes, and had a particularly ambivalent relationship with Lacanian psychoanalysis. This article therefore engages Lacanian theory to address what analysis from a psychoanalytic direction of causality can bring to Bourdieusian social theory. I contend that Lacanian theory can provide two key insights, demonstrated by reference to the same-sex marriage debate. First, I argue that fields are socio-historically constructed through the enactment of an imagined fantasy. Marriage has consequently institutionalized a cultural capital that reflects the imaginary of the dominant. I term this cultural capital ‘heterosexualness’. Second, I argue that the Lacanian account of the symbolic order allows the logic underlying political violence to be elucidated. This logic, illustrated through the concept of the sexuality bind, legitimizes violence against the Other when they violate the imagined rules of the field. Applying these insights, I conclude that the legalization of same-sex marriage fails to break down the symbolic boundaries between ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ that found the sexuality bind, instead reproducing the imaginary form of the sexuality bind institutionalized in marriage itself. This reproduces both an unequal right to national governance, and the imagined value of heterosexualness. By considering the psychoanalytic direction of causality, this article thus finds that the legalization of same-sex marriage will reinforce both the sexuality bind and the legitimacy of homophobic violence.
Acknowledgement
Many thanks to the reviewers for their helpful comments, and to Sarah Maddison for her constructive criticism during the writing of the Honours thesis on which this article is based, and her support and guidance since.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Callum Stewart graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Politics and International Relations. His research draws from diverse fields of critical theory, including race, queer, and feminist theory. It engages especially with psychoanalysis at the social and institutional levels, and agonistic democracy theory, to theorise and critique processes of social and political change.
Notes
1 ‘Heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ are herein used to denote subject-positions in the hegemonic symbolic order. These terms reflect the scientific discourse that grounds their social variants, such as ‘straight’ and ‘gay’.
When referred to without quotation marks, the heterosexual and the homosexual refer to the figure of those recognized as ‘heterosexual’ or ‘homosexual’ in the imaginary. The pronoun ‘they’ will be used to refer to these figures for gender neutrality.
I deliberately avoid any analytic definition of ‘homosexual’. I am interested in how this identification functions, not in the precisification of identity boundaries. Different people may embody the heterosexual and the homosexual in different ways, aspects, and contexts of their lives, even simultaneously. It is how they are recognized in symbolic terms through the imaginary that is important for this analysis of homophobic violence. As such, ‘homosexual’ may, in the course of this work, refer to a diverse range of identifications, including those who do not self-identify as homosexual but are commonly (mis)recognized as such. I suggest this includes, but is not limited to, men who sleep with men, trans and genderqueer people, bisexual people in same-sex relationships, and queer people more generally.
I define ‘queer’ as that which does not gain its meaning and value by reference to the master signifier, ‘nation’. It is that which lies outside the consensus of nationalist politics. ‘Homosexual’ is its symbolic location.
LGBTIQ community here denotes the general lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer socio-political community.
As in Lacanian psychoanalysis generally, big O Other refers to the symbolic figure of the Other, while little o other refers to other subjects in the imaginary.
2 Darmon (Citation2016), Fourny (Citation2000), and Steinmetz (Citation2013) provide insightful overviews of Bourdieu's engagement with psychoanalysis.
3 Signifiers other than ‘nation’ may constitute the master signifier of different social spheres. However, as the nation forms the primary level at which communal governance, particularly of sexuality, is institutionalized, it is the level that is here taken as the focus of my analysis.
4 As Richard von Krafft-Ebing stated in Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886 (quoted in Terry Citation1999, 48) the homosexual should not be punished so long as they ‘remain within the limits which are set for the activity of their sexual instinct’.
5 As such, the sexuality bind may be said to exist in any context in which the symbolic structure between ‘nation’, ‘heterosexual’, and ‘homosexual’, as here outlined, exists in the hegemonic symbolic order. Its imaginary form and implementation will vary with the context.
6 Such a marker is particularly important for those who have been otherwise marginalized, and are thereby more likely to be perceived as non-normal without that marker (Green Citation2013, 383–386).
7 Badgett’s (Citation2009, 67, 133) empirical research in the Netherlands demonstrates that same-sex marriage has not created substantial changes in behaviour within heterosexual marriages, nor ended homophobic prejudice. This supports my conclusion that the legalization of same-sex marriage does not significantly alter the image of marriage, and thus continues to legitimize homophobic violence.
8 Such governance is particularly strict when exposure of the homosexual will relates to children. The figure of the Child represents the ideal, innocent future of the nation. The exposure of queer practices to children is consequently said to violate their innocence (Faulkner Citation2010), as in several controversies over LGBTIQ anti-bullying programs in Australian schools since 2015. Governments, including the Federal government led by same-sex marriage supporter Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, have consequently enacted homophobic violence to remove the violating aspects of these programs, recognized as expressions of homosexual will, from public education (Martin Citation2016). Meanwhile children's exposure to heterosexual sexual practices in biology classrooms remains a ‘natural’ part of education.
9 Research suggests that gay, lesbian, and bisexual people who visibly engage in such practices, even in ‘gay-friendly’ workplaces, are excluded from the norm and can face negative repercussions (Williams, Giuffre, and Dellinger Citation2009).
10 As Nair (Citation2014) argues, the legalization of same-sex marriage has an attached condition – that of normality. This condition seeks to maintain the status quo, and delegitimizes deviation from the norm.