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These two very interesting essays seek to complicate developmental accounts of the formation of gender and sexual orientation. Although the developmental literature is somewhat new to me, I would like to raise a few questions about the kinds of explanations that are offered here, what we might expect from developmental accounts, and what kind of history they tell.
In a provocative and engaging essay, Hansell suggests at least two important theoretical points for the reconsideration of gender formation. First, he suggests that the repudiation of homosexuality that produces gendered melancholia within adult heterosexual men ought to be understood less as a repudiation of homosexual aim and object than as a compromise formation in which the aim is split off from its object. According to this latter view, the person to whom homosexual attachment has been made is not literally “lost,” and the homosexual desire for that person survives in the mode of disguise. Hansell argues that this form of disowning and disguising homosexual attachment actually allows for the satisfaction of homosexual desire under conditions that are not recognized to be fulfilling this function: “Much of what is forbidden and dangerous in any intrapsychic conflict is not forbidden impulses per se but the individual's conscious awareness of them.”
Thus, Hansell revises the point I made concerning the repudiation of homosexuality and the normative formation of gender by suggesting that the anxious heterosexual man who fears his homosexual