Undoing Gender

Butler cites Jessica Benjamin’s elucidation of “recognition,” noting how recognition involves “intersubjectivity” above object relations. Recognition involves a tension between the desires for omnipotence and contact, which imbues recognition with the possibility of transformative communication or destruction.

Butler questions Benjamin’s assertion of a triadic relationship that deviates from the Oedipal conflict. In the triad of subject, other, and a “third term,” Butler wants to avoid reducing the “third term” to the phallus, which relies on heterosexist ideology. Though Butler likes Benjamin’s model, which argues against the heteronormativity of the triangulation of the Oedipal conflict, they wish to rethink this triangulation in view of the “ek-static” while reducing adherence to gender dimorphism. Expanding on Jean Hyppolite, Butler outlines how desire for the other can be read in different ways, including but not limited to the Oedipal desire for the object which the other desires and possesses. Through the “exchange” of women in the Oedipal conflict, Butler illustrates how heterosexuality provides a venue for queerness. A queer reimagining of this process allows for possibilities that Lacanians omit or label pathological by arguing for the “primacy” of the phallus. Imagining a triad of a bisexual woman, a man who refuses to be “topped,” and a man whom the woman “tops,” Butler shows how a queer

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