Psychoanalytically oriented feminist accounts have persuasively diagnosed the manner in which the social sphere is constituted through a founding subjection of the feminine and the commodified exogamous exchange of women justified by the regulatory authority of the Name of the Father. Whilst this account apparently privileges a certain heterosexual imperative (as well as a founding prohibition: that against heterosexual incest) as the motor that drives sociality, I wish to argue that, paradoxically, male homosexuality has also had a strangely privileged (if occluded and undertheorized) role in the hermeneutic decoding of the patriarchal symbolic. For, in an interpretive move clearly intended to dereify the workings of the profoundly phallocentric logic at the heart of Western culture, theorists have often gestured toward the male homoeroticism that lies deeply repressed within the workings of an ostensibly heterosexual social symbolic.' The operations of erasure, foreclosure, disavowal, metaphorization, and specularization that have grounded the sexual contract of Western sociality in the refusal of positive admittance to the feminine have been read as signs of an archaic male pact, a solidarity and primal bond that underlies and underpins the fraudulent pretense of heterosexual relations.2 This logically, mythologically, and prehistorically prior male solidarity that apparently violently seized and monopolized the symbolic at the site of its very origin-with a violence, then, a primal rending or breaching that inscribed the very possibility of the symbolic, the possibility of the social, of history-has been understood as necessarily charged with homosexual desire.