Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive—Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender

Abstract

The author offers a revision of melancholy gender (Butler, 1995) in which sex differences are theorized. Drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic feminist theory that emphasizes the mother's role as primary caretaker and as pre-Oedipal object for both boys and girls, the author suggests that, in heterosexual development and within heterosexual cultures, same-sex object-desire is likely to be unavowedly lost for girls but preemptively foreclosed for boys. While the theory of melancholy gender does not differentiate between loss and foreclosure, the author argues that this is an important distinction such that Freud's two preconditions of melancholy—unavowed loss and ambivalent identification—are more likely to be part of female development than of male development, leading to melancholy femininity in girls and obsessive-compulsive masculinity in boys. This argument allows the theory of melancholy gender to speak to the empirical and clinical finding that femininity and depression tend to be associated whereas masculinity and depression do not.

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