Dyking Oedipal Logics of Sexual Difference

Psychoanalysis has historically produced and preserved the cultural and conceptual link between creativity and heterosexuality, and it has done so while systematically ignoring and concealing the generativity of queerness. This effort, which now reverberates in culture more broadly, takes place through specific mechanisms that naturalize and universalize kinship along Oedipal logics of sexual difference. Oedipus is not just a—or, the—theory of psychoanalysis; it is the logic we use to organize empirical reality itself and the logic behind all of our psychoanalytic theory. Ironically, in efforts to grapple with the known harms of our field, psychoanalysts have sought to reinvest in, and rescue, the universality of Oedipus. In the propagation of Oedipus through attempts at conceptual expansion, analysts have emptied Oedipus of any specificity, while paradoxically preserving it as the container—and limit—for psychoanalytic thinking. Contemporary literature on practices of queer kinship betrays the embedded fusions within psychoanalytic theorizing—between not just creativity and heterosexuality, but pathology and homosexuality as well. Psychoanalysis’s failure to imagine queer creativity, specifically through the Oedipal imposition made on lesbian parents who use donor sperm, repeats the same process of historically violent pathologizing of the “female homosexual.” The conceptual reinvestment in Oedipus, thus not only serves anti-queer power arrangements, but limits what psychoanalysts can appreciate as creative. What would become possible if, together, we cultivated the collective capacity to imagine more than Oedipus?