ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the concept of ideology continues to supply an indispensable tool not only for Marxist, but for feminist and gay studies. If ideology is central to the maintenance of classic masculinity, the affirmation of classic masculinity is equally central to the maintenance of governing "reality." Although this chapter arguing that ideology is sustained through the maintenance of collective belief, it considers the operations of belief through recourse to a psychoanalytic paradigm. Great virtues of the Althusserian model is that it provides beginning of a psychoanalytic theory of hegemony. Louis Althusser elaborates upon the economic and ideological functions of the family. The survival of whole "world," depends upon the preservation of two interlocking terms: the family, and the phallus. The dominant fiction would seem to interpret manque-a-etre or the Law of Language in relation to the local form assumed by the Law of Kinship Structure and kinship systems include sets of rules governing sexuality.
