ABSTRACT
Confining "sexual difference" to the construction of reproductive relations and "gender" to the wider category of sexuality must, then, not be taken in an absolute sense. What is more, the theory and practice may be moving away from its focus on reproduction and sexual difference towards a concern with gender, but at a time when the notion of gender has itself become etiolated as far as sexuality is concerned. Robert Stoller, the Californian psychoanalyst, notoriously introduced the distinction between "sex" as the biological factor and "gender" as the social contribution to a person's being. Reproduction, in dominant discourses, is counted on the side of the woman, and the fantasies people hear from patients or observe in children endorse a preoccupation with the mother. If the child is Oedipus, then it will be his mother who is the focus of attention.
