A Critique of Queer Phenomenology: Gender and the Sexual

This article critiques Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology in light of psychoanalytic theory of sexuality. I argue that there is a conspicuous absence of the unconscious, sexuality, and fantasy in Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. I turn to the work of Jean Laplanche both to address this absence and to argue for a theory of the formation of sexuality and gender that is not exhausted by the phenomenal world.