I waited to write this post in the hopes of some deus ex machina event where the lights of heaven would shine down upon me and bring me an epiphany as to what Butler was saying. Alas it did not happen, so here is my best guess as to what she is saying about melancholia and how it relates to gender identity.
First I will start off with what I gathered from Freud as this is where Butler draws from. As we defined it in class and as he defines it in his essay "Mourning and Melancholia" melancholia is a state one enter when they have lost an object of love and they have internalized this loss in their ego (Freud 244-45). Melancholia differs from Mourning in this internalizing factor. People who experience melancholia feel as though this loss is a loss in their ego, instead of a loss in the world. Butler ties melancholia to gender identification by claiming that one loss that we all internalize is our desire for incest. In Butler's own words, "this process of internalizing lost loves becomes pertinent to gender formation when we realize that the incest taboo, among other functions, initiates a loss of a love-object for the ego and that this ego recuperates from this loss through the internalization of the tabooed object of desire"(79).
Now, for me this belief that we all inherently have incestuous desires seems a bit unrealistic and so does Butler's idea that we handle this denial of desire in a melancholic way and internalize, but for the sake of trying to understand her argument I am going to ignore my issues with these assumptions. The question then remains: How does the process of internalizing the lost love object of incest lead to gender identification?According to Freud and Butler it is in part due to the fact that when we internalizethis loss we are identifying with it as well and this is crcial in the formation of our character and also or gender identity (Butler 79). So the young child identifies with these forbidden incestuous feelings and this plays into the formation of their gender identity, but how? To me this does not seem like a logical leap. Here is how Butler explains it:
In the case of the prohibited heterosexual union [the desire for insect], it is the object which is denied
[the opposite sex parent], but not the modality of desire, so that the desire is deflected from the
object [the opposite sexed parent] onto other objects of the opposite sex [aka attraction to the
opposite sex]. But in the case of a prohibited homosexual union, it is clear that both the desire and
the object require renunciation and so become the subject to the internalizing strategies of melancholia.
'Hence the young boy deals with his father by identifying himself with him.'(79-80).
In other words it is when the child feels an attraction to the parent of the same sex as he that he feels the taboo of not only the incest but of the homosexuality and there for he internalizes this desire which allows the young boy to foster and identification with his father. This does not happen when the attraction is to the parent of the opposite sex because it is only the incest that is taboo and there for it is given up and is not internalized. This is, at least, how I have come to understand what Butler is saying. She goes on to say Freud's idea of the boy's fear of castration by the father is really more of a fear of feminization because of his homosexual love of the father in heterosexual society (80).
While this makes sense several questions then arrise. Why does the boy not also internalize his of his mother and begin an identifation process with her as well? Could a child perhaps not internalize any of this and handle it in a fashion more similar to mourning? What if the child never experiences a homosexual to its same sex parent? Would it then never be able to form a proper gender identity? As with most pyschoanalysis I feel like it provides an interesting explanation but it depends upon a variety of very bizzare things to be true and considered as fact (such as all children experience incestuous desires). Anyhow, this is how I understand Butler's general arugument for how melancholia relates to gender identification. If that deus ex machina event actually happens and the rest of her article makes perfect sense I will add more. Until then, happy reading!
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Rutledge Classics, 1990. Print.
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