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This paper aims to trace the legacy of the Oedipal foundations on analytic theories of gender and sexuality. Hetero-normativity places restrictions not only on homosexuality but also on gender and heterosexuality and these drawbacks have failed to be adequately recognized, indeed have been safeguarded at considerable cost to lived lives of all genders and sexualities.
Traditional approaches to homosexuality have viewed it as a gender disorder, a result of cross-gender identification. This view persists, albeit in more sophisticated form, as an inevitable result of the barrier between identification and desire that is crucial to the Oedipal resolution. Re-theorizing homosexuality is necessary to free gender from its sexual constrictions; re-theorizing gender is necessary to free homosexuality from its gendered constrictions; both require re-theorizing Oedipus.
A foundation for such challenge, however, was laid by Freud himself in his recognition of the impossibility of defining gendered content, while necessarily making attempts to do so, and his conviction that homosexuality was no illness, while being unable to save it from pathology. The continual tying of the homosexuality/gender knot does a disservice to the radical origins of the psychoanalytic tradition and an even greater disservice to the further understanding of sexuality and gender.