ABSTRACT
Gender and sexuality are foundational categories of mind and culture. They become visible as normative imperatives and as symbolic resources only through the work of critical deconstruction- political, psychoanalytic and academic. Contemporary feminists, gay and lesbian scholars, queer theorists, and generations of psychoanalysts looking for better ideas about sex and gender have debunked and revised Freud's phallic monism many times over. Yet there are many unarticulated contradictions within and between contemporary views of gender and sexuality. In the modernist tradition of feminist theory, gender and sexuality are taken as transhistorical features of culture, just as the modernist viewpoint within psychoanalysis conceives of sex and gender as universal psychic phenomena. One approach, developed by Foucault, is to contrast what he called the 'genealogies' of sex and gender by tracking how each has been discursively positioned in the history of psychoanalysis and, by extension, in popular culture.
