Lacan meets queer theory

This chapter envisions a dialogue between Lacan and queer theory, a sort of round table in which various contemporary theorists of sexuality would directly engage Lacan-and he them. But, of course, Lacan died well before queer theory emerged as such; and, as Thomas Yingling observed, queer theorists prepared to grapple with Freud none the less have remained relatively shy of tackling the corpus of speculative work bequeathed by Lacan (Yingling, 1997, p. 191). On the other hand, I discovered to my disappointment at an International Conference on Sexuation (in New York City, April 1997, where I first presented a preliminary version of this paper) that for their part Lacanian analysts proved far less willing to engage queer theory than I, perhaps naively, had anticipated. Yet spurred on by my conviction that psychoanalysis is a queer theory, I’ve persisted with this imaginary encounter, a dialogue between-to invoke Yeats-self and antiself.