Dimen, Muriel and Virginia Goldner, eds. Gender in Psychoanalytic Space. New York:  Other P, 2002.

Gender in Psychoanalytic Space, a new collection of essays edited by Muriel Dimen and Virginia Goldner, can be read as a mystery novel asking the important question of what happened to gender in the 20^th Century. Beginning with Judith Butler's important work on melancholia and gender identifications, this book shows how complicated and vexing the issues surrounding gender and identity have become in the post-modern period, where feminist theory meets post-structuralist accounts of subjectivity and queer notions of sexuality. For Butler strongly argues that postoedipal gender identifications can only be derived from a prior foreclosure of homosexual object-choices. Moreover, these primary homosexual desires are never completely denied, and thus they continue to haunt the development of every gendered subject.

The haunting of gendered identity by the queering of pre-oedipal object relations serves as a latent, recurring theme throughout these collected essays. For example, this notion of homosexual category destabilization pushes Ken Corbett, in the essay following Butler's, to declare that in order to avoid gender confusion, analysts have often tried to force male homosexuality into a heterosexist binary equating passivity with femininity and masculinity with activity (22). By turning to the actual experience of male homosexuals in analysis, Corbett shows how certain subjects live the deconstruction of gender binaries on a daily basis. Thus, even as society—and many psychoanalysts—continue to react to gender blurring by re-instating modern binary constructions, actual clinical experience shows how reductive these gender categories can be.

The first chapters indicate in a very subtle manner that the cultural recognition of homosexual desire in the 20^th Century is one of the key driving forces behind the postmodern challenge of modern notions of identity, gender, sexuality, and cultural ideology. Furthermore, both of these essays use Freud's theories of homosexuality to