Customer Reviews

Beyond Sexuality

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This is perhaps my favorite work in the growing corpus of queer theory. While much of the discipline has become sedimentations of regurgitated contentions about 'culturally constructed subjectivities,' Dean argues clearly and convincingly for a social theory which does not reduce desire to historical variability. Desire, he reminds us, is the failure of discourse, not its unequivocal success. With this as his starting place, Dean suggests that what we locate in psychoanalysis is neither some return to an isolated self independent from a social or linguistic context nor a culturally-formed subjectivity reducible to that context. Reading desire as fundamentally recalcitrant to social discourses that are always trying to grasp it, it emerges in his work as inherently disruptive or transgressive, as necessarily queer. Whether he is working with Freud's concept of the death drive as an explication of contemporary social responses to AIDS, elucidating Lacan's 'object a' as the inevitable interlinking of the desirable with the abject, or demonstrating why a model of the unconscious is necessary for grasping the fantasies that undergird our culture's ideas about gay men, Dean cogently argues for the rich potential that psychoanalysis contributes to our understanding of sexuality and society.

This is really quite good. Keep your eyes peeled for Dean's next book, out soon.