The “uncanny” and the queer experience

By Vincent Bourseul
English

The call someone a “queer” means to designate a person whose sexual or gender identity is experienced as strange by an other. This encounter with strangeness often leads to the feelings of the uncanny, of anxiety linked to the repressed. In this way, the “queer experience” can be read through Freud’s notion of “the uncanny”, as a sign of the return of previous psychic conflict, the reactualization of which may lead to a faltering of the solutions, handlings and infantile theories which had been instituted in order to defend the ego against a historical conflict, for example one connected to sexual difference.

  • identity
  • identification
  • the uncanny
  • abjection
  • queer
  • sexual difference
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