Che cosa viene perso nella costituzione di un’identità sessuale?

Abstract

In this paper, I develop Judith Butler’s discussion of the Freudian concept of ‘primary dispositions’. For Freud, we have bisexual primary dispositions (both male and female), and we loose one of them at the œdipal stage. We then become man or woman, and hetero- or homosexual. According to Butler, this is too naturalistic a conception. What can these dispositions be outside innate characters? Butler agrees that the constitution of a gendered identity always implies a loss or a mourning, but the identity which is lost never precedes the loss. It is rather constituted by the loss itself.