Michel Foucault: The Queer Gender for Psychoanalysis?

Why should a practitioner of psychoanalysis read Foucault? Is Foucault still a "hot topic" for psychoanalysts in 2019? To prevent psychoanalysis from becoming a dead language, reading and re-reading Michel Foucault proves highly relevant, as it also implies reading queer, gay, lesbian, and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPsychoanalytic inquiry Vol. 40; no. 8; pp. 579 - 590
Main Author Laufer, Laurie
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Routledge 16.11.2020
Laurence Erlbaum Associates
Taylor & Francis Inc
Subjects
Butler, Judith
Discourses
Etiology
Foucauldian analysis
Foucault, Michel
Gender identity
Gender studies
Heteronormativity
Heterosexuality
Language death
Lesbianism
Oedipus complex
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysts
Reading
Sexuality
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Summary:Why should a practitioner of psychoanalysis read Foucault? Is Foucault still a "hot topic" for psychoanalysts in 2019? To prevent psychoanalysis from becoming a dead language, reading and re-reading Michel Foucault proves highly relevant, as it also implies reading queer, gay, lesbian, and gender studies. This article draws on queer authors such as Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick, and Judith Butler, as well as Freud, Lacan, and Allouch to reflect on how sexuality and gender identity can possibly be conceived in the Freudian field and beyond a hetero-normative gender binary perspective. Both with and after Foucault, as the genealogist of Freudian psychoanalysis, what would psychoanalysis be without discourses on heterosexual families, Oedipus, sexuality, sexual etiology, and infantile sexuality? Reading Foucault sets forth a new erotology and thus amounts to rediscovering "the political honor of psychoanalysis."
ISSN:0735-1690
1940-9133
DOI:10.1080/07351690.2020.1826214