ABSTRACT
This chapter envisions a dialogue between Jacques Lacan and queer theory, a sort of round table in which various contemporary theorists of sexuality would directly engage Lacan—and them. It shows how Lacan makes good on certain radical moments in Freud, such as the latter's counter-heterosexist observation that "the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object's attractions". The chapter demonstrates how Lacan pursues the logic of Freudian insights about sex to a new destination. It argues that the radical Freudian tradition discredits the otherwise amazingly durable nineteenth-century notion that homosexual desire expresses "a feminine soul trapped in a masculine body", or vice versa. The chapter discredits the idea that psychoanalysis is a modern technology designed to regulate and normalize sexuality, as some queer theorists, following Foucault, continue to claim. It elaborates on Lacan's antinormative potential and accounts for queer theory's failure to exploit that potential.
