Michel Foucault: The Queer Gender for Psychoanalysis?

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.”