ABSTRACT
Within European modernities, shaped through Cartesian traditions of philosophy, dominant white heterosexual masculinities have learnt to experience emotions as a sign of weakness and as a threat to their male identities. Freud in Civilisation and its Discontents shows how European modernities in relation to bodies, sexualities and emotional lives are very much shaped through the secularisation of a dominant Christian tradition. European modernities were presented in terms of white superiority secured in universal terms as the transcendence as disembodied rational selves of animal natures and material and natural worlds. Freud questions the discourses of European modernities that talk about freedom, equality and human emancipation from suffering while unable to hear the sufferings produced by sexual repression. He refuses the distinction between nature and culture that have shaped structuralist and post-structuralist traditions as he refuses the categorical distinction between reason and nature, which have shaped traditions of modern philosophy and social theory within European colonising modernities.
