Homosexuality and Queerness in Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis and in Contemporary Queer and Psychoanalytic Theory

This article first offers a psychoanalytic reading of homosexuality as formalized in Sigmund Freud's <i>Three Essays</i> and in Jacques Lacan's rereading of Freud in his first Seminar. In contradistinction to a more commonplace and more limited and limiting reading of homosexuality as an identity category understood primarily (if not exclusively) in identitarian and communitarian terms, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as this article illustrates, conceptualizes homosexuality in mental (or psychic) terms. More specifically, instead of bespeaking the homogenizing and universalizing language of the group (i.e. "the homosexuals"), the more productive, and crucially ethical, rhetoric of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis bespeaks the particular and even singular speech of every homosexual subject. Freud's and Lacan's psychoanalytically oriented thinking on homosexuality will be distinguished from two early representative examples, namely, from Michel Foucault's parochial historicist perspective and from Guy Hocquenghem's theorization on homosexual desire. Further, we will present and elaborate a psychoanalytic perspective on homosexuality vis-à-vis perversity-albeit not as an aberration from a social norm or moral conduct, but according to its underlying unconscious mechanism of disavowal. Lastly, this article articulates and advances an ethics of homosexuality and, more inclusively, queerness by reading several representative examples of contemporary queer and psychoanalytic theory.