Queering Žižek

This essay tracks Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Jacques Lacan in order to expose and critique Žižek’s continued investment in a heterosexist account of sexual difference. Attending to Žižek’s politicized recasting of Lacan’s argument that one can traverse—and thereby alter—the fundamental fantasy that structures subjectivity, this essay argues that despite Žižek’s protestations to the contrary, sexual difference is not inalterable. Rather, sexual difference is the fundamental fantasy that Lacanian psychoanalytic theory needs to traverse in order to fully register the many possible configurations of desiring subjectivities.