On the Politics of Writing Sex: Response to Commentaries on Disorienting Sexuality

I want to thank the editors of Gender and Psychoanalysis for featuring our book, and Jack Drescher, Donald Moss, Joanna Ryan, and Adria Schwartz for their rich, provocative commentaries. The papers both comment on and extend the work that we began in Disorienting Sexuality: an articulation and critique of homophobia in psychoanalytic theory and practice, and an attempt to rewrite the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality in a new image. As Joanna Ryan points out, the complicated question that arises is: in “what new image or new images?” The image the editors proposed in the book was largely one that came from a Butlerian/Foucauldian/social-constructivist perspective. Ryan is right to wish for more diversity.

In postmodern psychoanalysis any discussion about what image to use for revisioning sexuality must struggle with the following questions: Are concepts of normality and pathology viable any longer? If so, what criteria should we use now that normative heterosexuality is no longer considered foundational? How can we describe sexuality in a way that is not destructive to sexual minorities? How can we write theory that doesn't prescribe new regulatory practices, and as Joanna Ryan suggests,