Imagine There Are No Lesbians: Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory and the Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Parenting

Abstract

Law reform in the area of homosexual rights usually proceeds as if heterosexuality is outside its scope and interests. What remains unthought, therefore, is the way in which heterosexuality functions not simply as a paradigm of the rights to be enjoyed by all but as the constitutive limit to their deliverance. This quarantining of heterosexuality from homosexuality is a common feature of discourse in general, but it is one that has been thoroughly critiqued in queer theory and psychoanalysis where it is acknowledged that homosexuality, as heterosexuality's Other', is what heterosexuality requires to stabilise and give continuous effect to its own boundaries. Homosexual identities, then, are identities in which heterosexuality also has an investment, and their various identifiers ('gay', 'lesbian', etc) help to keep heterosexuality's boundaries in place. Queer theory's intervention in this economy has been (at least at the level of theory) to destabilise the borders of heterosexuality, to deconstruct the hierarchically ordered binary of heterosexuality and homosexuality in a move aimed at queering 'straightness'.3 However, the continual use of the term 'queer' as simply a synonym for 'gay' or 'lesbian', or even as a more inclusive descriptor of sexual identity also containing 'bisexual' and 'trans-gendered' fellow travellers strips it of its political force and eradicates its capacity to destabilise the heterosexual paradigm. Such usage of 'queer' is common both within the 'gay and lesbian community' as well as more broadly; it is a product of an identity politics which keeps in place the heterosexual-homosexual binary just as effectively as the other terms used in the identity/sexuality continuum. Queer and identity, however, do not mix: to be queer (at least in theory) is not indexed by sexual practices or type of relationships, but rather aims to express the notion of sexuality beyond identity, and it therefore raises questions for all of us as to how the boundaries of our sexuality (in the broadest sense of that term) can be located, if at all. Some of the resistance to queering heterosexuality can be understood as the resistance to the renunciation of homosexual identity, which can, in part, be understood as an investment in keeping the hierarchically ordered binary heterosexual-homosexual in place. But investments in this binary cannot be understood primarily or even most helpfully in terms of sexual identity, and are more productively analysed as investments in the paradigm of heterosexuality itself. As a paradigm, it functions as a principle of social order, a normative frame through which one learns to imagine, and a principle through which one comes to know, one's sexuality. As such, it belongs to homosexuality too, whatever may become of it within the lived articulation of sexuality for people who love others of the same sex. The resistance to applying queer theory in its radical philosophical formulation is an instance where this mutually constitutive formation heterosexualhomosexual shows the force of its bond. Neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality can renounce the heterosexual paradigm, in which homosexual is the necessary other to the constitutive norm. Yet the dual aims of destabilising heterosexuality as the superior term in the binary, and of critiquing the general system which makes this possible, are together the sine qua non of queer theory. A politics simply focussed on contesting the position of heterosexuality as the superior term (that is, an equality politics) would fail the deconstructive purpose of displacing the general system. This would be to annul queer, and to remain within the paradigm which queer critiques in which the various sexual identities remain relatively coherent and stable categories. This is to say, also, that the extent to which the term 'queer' is clung to as an index of homosexual identity is the extent to which its capacity to function as properly queer, as it were, is disabled. …