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This. Reply offers clarification of the author's thesis. What was originally a reciprocal, pleasurable experience for each sex of mutual interpenetration with the preoedipal mother devolves into a split, gendered polarity. The specific form this takes for a boy – repudiation of identification with the mother and with maternal qualities – is seen to be detrimental to male development. I theorize a culturally normative, gender-specific neurosis caused not by maternal care but by the difficulty in male development of continuing to incorporate the surplus pleasures of maternal penetration given a problematic model of masculinity. My aim in >Unlawful Entry< is not to reverse gendered power relations but to forward their elimination.
Response to discussions
(2001)
In this paper, it is argued that males as well as females have an early experience in relation to the nursing mother of being receptive to bodily and psychic penetration. Males tend to lose access to this experience and may come to fear penetration as a threat such that a masculine sense of self is felt to be dependent on an impermeable psychic boundary that is not to be penetrated. Instead, phallicism as a fortress of emotional self-sufficiency – which the author labels the citadel complex – becomes the matrix of a subjective sense of masculinity. The multiple and combined forces of bodily development, the establishment of gender identity, and the process of separation-individuation are examined for their role in this process. A critique of the Lacanian concept of paternal law suggests that the >law of the father< can be interpreted as a law regulating penetration. Paternal law can be viewed as a code for the establishment of an impenetrable masculinity whereby entry into an adult male psyche becomes unthinkable, >unlawful.< An impermeable bodily and psychic boundary – the ability to penetrate without the ability to be penetrated – collapses a necessary dialectical tension that may affect men's experience of sex and of love and that may shape and limit their desire.