Commentary on Ayouch

In this article Thamy Ayouch discusses a psychoanalysis who aspires to sustain the voices of subaltern minorities in postcolonial society. Addressing the issue of Moroccan “homosexualities”, the author challenges the use of western categories to describe the experience of Moroccan men and women who engage in homosexual practices. He adopts a Foucauldian perspective that challenges universal, ahistorical notions about sexuality, and shows how constructions of sexual identities, in western societies, are the result of an over emphasis, and an overproduction of knowledge regarding sexuality. In western societies, according to Foucault, the social control over sexuality has moved from the repressive, external power of the imposition of a law, to an internalized power. The internalization of dominant norms regarding sexuality has been achieved initially trough the Christian practice of confession, and later through pedagogy, medicine, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Because of this change of the dynamics of social control, in western societies sexual practices, are not anymore only private experiences, but have become the object of public discourse. The main goal of this public discourse is not the suppression of sexuality, but the social control, and the influence of dominant ideologies on the deployment of sexual identities.

Psychoanalysis has been an integral part of the complex technology of social control and of the production of a grammar defining the identities of subaltern groups according to the specific interests and values of a dominant group. The dominant view in psychoanalysis has promoted an understanding of “human nature” based on the universalization of specific assumptions and experiences of the European middle-class bourgeoisie. This dominant view fails to adequately represent the experience of minorities and working-class groups in western societies. It fails even more radically to represent the subjective experience of nonwestern subaltern groups like M