ABSTRACT
This chapter explains a brief history of writings on homosexuality, trying to provide an epistemological understanding. It examines homosexuality from the perspective of post-modernism, and will return to a classical psychoanalytic perspective that focuses on the body. When gender and sexuality are in question, there has been a historical tendency to think in terms of mutually exclusive binaries, usually the opposition of male vs female, but equally homosexuality vs heterosexuality, and perhaps trans-gender vs cis-gender. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed powerful intellectual and social movements to establish the rights of homosexual people in relation to the heterosexual world, in the context of the fight to remove homosexuality from the DSM. Taking the necessary argument to its logical conclusion, object to the assumption that homosexuality stands in particular need of explanation; it seems to belie the purpose of psychoanalysis and to embrace the implicit hetero-normativity which the term conveys.
