Page 24 - Culture and Cultural Studies

AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES 23

The Oedipus complex

In classical Freudian thought, the Oedipus complex marks the formation of the ego and
of gendered subjectivity. Prior to the Oedipal moment, we are unable to distinguish
clearly between ourselves and other objects and nor do we have a sense of ourselves as
male or female. An infant’s first love-object is its mother, whom it both identifies with and
desires. That is, the child wants both to ‘be’ the mother and to ‘possess’ the mother. The
resolution of the Oedipus complex involves the repudiation of the mother as a love-
object and the separation of the subject from the mother.
For boys, the incest taboo, symbolized by the power of the father as Phallus, means that
desire for the mother is untenable and threatened by punishment in the form of castra-
tion. As a consequence, boys shift their identification from the mother to the father and
take on masculinity and heterosexuality as the desirable subject form. For girls, the sepa-
ration from the mother is more complex and arguably never completed. Girls do not
entirely repudiate mother identification nor do they take on father identification.
However, they do recognize the power of the Phallus as something which they do not have
(penis envy) but which the father does. Since they do not have a penis (or symbolic
Phallus), and thus cannot ever ‘be’ it, they cannot identify with it. However, they can set
out to possess it. This they do by seeking to have a child by the father or, more accurately,
other men who stand in for the father as Phallus.
Psychoanalysis can be understood to be an ahistorical universal account of subjectivity
marking the psychic processes of humankind across history. Furthermore, for many crit-
ics it is inherently patriarchal and phallocentric. As such it has proved to be unacceptable
within cultural studies. However, sympathetic critics have suggested that psychoanalysis
can be reworked as an historically contingent account of subject formation – that is, one
that describes it only under specific historical circumstances. Changes in the cultural and
symbolic order are said to lead to changes in subject formation, and vice versa. The sub-
versiveness of psychoanalysis would then lie in its disruption of the social order, including
gendered relations, by trying to bring new kinds of thinking and subjectivities into being.
Thus, psychoanalysis could, it is argued, be stripped of its phallocentrism and be made
appropriate to the political project of feminism (Chapter 9).

The politics of difference: feminism, race and postcolonial theory
A theme of structuralism and poststructuralism is the idea that meaning is generated
through the play of difference down a chain of signifiers. Subjects are formed through
difference, so that what we are is constituted in part by what we are not.

There has been a growing emphasis on difference in the cultural field, and in
particular on questions of gender, race and nationality.

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