ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses primarily on the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminist and lesbian theory. Heterosexual genital and reproductive sexuality are only the tenuous results of the repression and reordering of the heterogeneity of drive impulses. De Lauretis's revisionism is aimed at three target concepts: the notion of castration, the centrality of repression, and the concept of the masculinity complex, a cluster of concepts that deserve rigorous interrogation. De Lauretis's reliance on it as the sole explanatory framework in her account of the structuring of lesbian desire. De Lauretis quotes a crucial passage from Bersani and Dutoit's analysis: The crucial point—which makes the fetishistic object different from the phallic symbol—is that the success of the fetish depends on its being seen as authentically different from the missing penis. In fetishism, however, the refusal to see the fetish as a penis-substitute may not be simply an effect of repression.
