ABSTRACT
When a young boy announces that he plans to grow up and marry his mother, he probably has some facts of life explained to him. He is likely to be told that he cannot marry his mother, but he may be encouraged to wait until he grows up so he can marry a woman like her. Psychoanalysts refer to this encounter as the positive resolution of the oedipal complex and regard it to be the sine qua non of a heterosexual male identity (Freud, 1924). Whether that is so may be debatable, but the oedipal narrative is only one of many ritualized and sanctioned ways in which links between anatomical gender and heterosexuality are supported and encouraged by cultural forces.
