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The author offers a revision of melancholy gender (Butler, 1995) in which sex differences are theorized. Drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic feminist theory that emphasizes the mother's role as primary caretaker and as pre-Oedipal object for both boys and girls, the author suggests that, in heterosexual development and within heterosexual cultures, same-sex object-desire is likely to be unavowedly lost for girls but preemptively foreclosed for boys. While the theory of melancholy gender does not differentiate between loss and foreclosure, the author argues that this is an important distinction such that Freud's two preconditions of melancholy—unavowed loss and ambivalent identification—are more likely to be part of female development than of male development, leading to melancholy femininity in girls and obsessive-compulsive masculinity in boys. This argument allows the
This work was supported by a Predoctoral National Research Service Award from National Institute of Mental Health (MH63548), the American Psychoanalytic Association Fellowship Program, a Dissertation Grant from the Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures at UC Berkeley, the Abigail Reynolds Hogden Publication Fund in the Social Sciences at UC Berkeley, and the Sheldon J. Korchin Prize from the Department of Psychology at UC Berkeley. Leslie Bell, Natalie Boero, Lisa Buchberg, Nancy Chodorow, Tai Katzenstein, and C. J. Pascoe offered important comments on previous drafts of this article.
theory of melancholy gender to speak to the empirical and clinical finding that femininity and depression tend to be associated whereas masculinity and depression do not.
An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person, the object-relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of a withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement of it onto a new one, but something different, for whose coming about conditions seem to be necessary. The object-cathexis proved to have little power of resistance and was brought to an end. But the free libido was not displaced onto another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object [Freud, 1917, pp. 248-249].
Is there a way in which gender identifications or, rather, those identifications which become central to the formation of gender, are produced through melancholic identification? More particularly, it seems clear that the positions of “masculine” and “feminine,” which Freud (1905) understood as the effects of laborious and uncertain accomplishment, are established in part through prohibitions that demand the loss of certain sexual attachments and demand as well that these losses not be avowed and not be grieved [Butler, 1995, pp. 167-168].