The Role of Phantasy in Representations and Practices of Homosexuality

Le résumé fourni par la source

Unconscious fantasy, a prerequisite of desire, veils the Heideggerian “nothing” at the heart of subjectivity. In psychoanalytic terms, this “nothing” is a non-symbolizable Otherness constitutive of subjective division. Unconscious fantasy supports the divided subject by organizing desire as lack. Cultural fantasies similarly suture over the cracks or gaps, providing a desiring template supported by ego ideals and group demands. The social privileging of heterosexual monogamous object-relations buttresses political, ideological, and economic ends (Edelman, Crimp, Berlant, Giffney, etc.). Freud (2001/1921) noted that homosexuality potentially figures the radical dissolution of the social contract, disturbing the fantasy that supports it. Analyzing fantasmatic significations, concerning gay men’s bodies since the 1980s, and assessing the stakes involved, Watson sheds light on discursive networks of power. Here, homosexuality serves as a placeholder of “excess,” “otherness,” and “dis-ease.” Reading Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship ( 1999 ) and Edmund White’s Our Young Man ( 2016 ), Watson draws out distinctions in the representations of beauty and homosexuality reflecting on what they reveal about Western culture’s libidinal economy, attendant anxieties, and “dis-ease” regarding sexuality. Critically assessing the problematics of “otherness” plays out in the field of sexual relations, Watson discusses how Western culture might deal with irreducible “nothing” or “otherness.”

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