Abstract
The aim of this article is to branch out the debate between psychoanalysis and queer studies, focusing on the interlocution drawn by Judith Butler with the works of Freud and Lacan. Returning to the way Butler articulates Foucault, Derrida and psychoanalysis to think about gender trouble, we show that psychoanalytic theory allows the philosopher to situate, from her conception of gender melancholy, the points of failure of the norm in function of the psychic life of power. After all, even though normative cis-heterosexuality imposes a script of identifications and object-choices on its subjects, there is an unpredictability to the way in which each one will respond to the normative injunctions of culture, so that norms fail to fully determine subjectivity. Gender melancholy thus becomes a mark of the importance of psychoanalysis in Butler’s path. Then, we discuss the philosopher’s interpellations to the Lacanian symbolic order, as well as the nuances progressively introduced in her reading of sexual difference. Along Butler’s path, sexual difference is no longer considered a theory of heterosexuality and is presented as a border-concept, a vacillating frontier, which we take here as an invitation to produce a non-normative rereading of sexual difference in psychoanalysis, resorting to the Lacanian theory of sexuation. Finally, we locate the uncanniness of jouissance and the irreducible character of sexuality to social norms as an important shared axis between Butler and psychoanalysis.
Keywords:
Gender; Sexuality; Sexual Difference; Social Norms; Enjoyment
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