ABSTRACT
Lacanian and post-Lacanian feminist critics have challenged biological accounts of gender - which have so often been employed to justify and perpetuate sexist practices - and have demonstrated that gender-identity and sexual division are products of the symbolic order. Before considering Juliet Mitchell's Lacanian-based account of sexual division, however, it is necessary to briefly retrace Sigmund Freud's account of female sexuality and to indicate the nature of the debates it has generated within psychoanalytical theory. In Freud's early writings, the particular forms through which the Oedipus complex are 'resolved' depends upon a simple set of human relationships. The several components of Freud's account of sexual difference just described have been an area of ongoing theoretical dispute and contestation, both inside and outside of psychoanalytical quarters. The strength of Freud's position in contrast, Mitchell argues, is that castration is understood to institute the humanization of the small infant in its sexual difference.
