ABSTRACT

Heteronormativity is a structuring force in personal and social life in America. And, it is through a heteronormative lens that many social institutions, and too often the psychoanalytic community, have construed and regulated individuals, gender identity, and social roles. If boys' masculinity is not threatening to their mothers, indeed if they identify with it, boys will be more likely to stay attached to and identified with their mothers even as they gravitate—under the normalizing authority of heteronormativity and male privilege—to a more emphatic paternal identification. The revisionist counterclaim strikes us as compelling: even as boys traverse the road from the preoedipal to the Oedipal, given good enough parenting they sustain a vital emotional bond with their mothers. Gender imposition entails a compulsory demand to performatively present as a conventional boy and that means a straight boy.