Chapter 2, Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix, Section IV, Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification Summary and Analysis

Lacan, Riviere and Freud offer different accounts about how gender identifications work, but feminist critics often focus on maternal identification. Sometimes there is recourse to the unconscious, and in any event there is no identity-fixing in advance. In fact, one might hold that multiple and simultaneous identifications occur and they produce various conflicts and convergences that produce a complex process of shifting identity. This can be left open and leads to adopting 'incorporation' as the mechanisms of gender identification, the process of slowly incorporating various attributes. Incest and homosexuality taboos can't tell the whole story. Melancholia explanations have more plausibility. Desires lead to incorporation which...