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When I first skim-read Psychoanalysis, The Body, and the Oedipal Plot, I panicked. Panic is not my usual reaction when faced with the task of a brief review. Was I not going to be able to understand a word, as so much seemed careless or plain wrong? However, quite differently, was it her fulsome tribute to Judith Butler at start and finish that caused this strange anxiety? There is much in Magallanes book that overlaps with my own work, yet it was as though Butler’s and my reputed hostility to each other’s ideas has created me here as a “cut out”, utterly absent, non-existent; although sometimes I feel I am being quoted, there is simply not a single reference to me.
And I find comfort in a companion – Julia Kristeva, psychoanalyst originator and theorist of “abjection”, who receives just one single mention in the final pages of the Conclusion, where we learn that:
One part of this book uses Kristeva’s concept of abjection in Powers of Horror and Judith Butler’s notion of abject bodies in Bodies that Matter as a main point. Although I only mention it once, this idea is central to my thesis. (105)
Indeed, it is. However, more extensively Magallanes and I share psychoanalysis and feminism. I read the Introduction again, this time carefully; it concludes: “It would give me great pleasure if you as readers take this theory to your particular contexts and help me to break, transform and deconstruct it” (3). I calmed down; I liked her. Perhaps, I could take Matisse’s so-positive “cut-outs” to heart.
Maybe in this digital age with social media –Twitter, Facebook and the like – being assimilated rather than acknowledged simply does not matter. After all, in a earlier time this is what happened to the crucial concept of “bisexuality”, and here, that theme appears once again in another guise. Magallanes is much impressed by the work of Preciado on the body as an archive. Preciado (Beatrix and/or Paul) also argues that “sexual difference” is unitary and is not only not binary, b