Gender Trouble
Summary

Butler extends these accounts of gender identification in order to emphasize the productive or performative aspects of gender. With Lévi-Strauss, they suggest that incest is "a pervasive cultural fantasy" and that the presence of the taboo generates these desires; with Riviere, they state that mimicry and masquerade form the "essence" of gender; with Freud, they assert that "gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition", and therefore that "same-sexed gender identification" depends on an unresolved (but simultaneously forgotten) homosexual cathexis (with the father, not the mother, of the Oedipal myth). For Butler, "heterosexual melancholy is culturally instituted as the price of stable gender identities", and for heterosexuality to remain stable, it demands the notion of homosexuality, which remains prohibited but necessarily within the bounds of culture. Finally, they point again to the productivity of the incest taboo, a law which generates and regulates approved heterosexuality and subversive homosexuality, neither of which exists before the law.
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