longstoryshortikilledhim:

The idea that The Last Jedi has prominent phallic/yonic symbolism and that the sexual implications of these are essential for the identity formation and ‘inevitable union’ of Kylo Ren and Rey comes up time and time again, with a healthy dose of discussion of the incest taboo, castration, the symbolic act of killing the father and the son’s repentance. The following meta is a polite cough to draw attention to the fact that while referring to the ideas of Freud, Lacan (and the post-Lacanians), Riviere and Lévi-Strauss to support these arguments might seem to be a well-informed approach, it has toxic implications that must be kept in mind.

First of all: these theories are all theoretically flawed and self-contradictory, because they stem from the same misinformed idea:  

Any psychoanalytic theory that prescibes a developemental process that presupposes the accomplishement of a given father-son or mother-daughter identification mistakenly conflates the Symbolic with the real and misses the critical point of incommensurability that exposes “identification” and the drama of “being” and “having” the Phallus as invariably phantasmatic. 

Jacqueline Rose in Feminine Sexuality 

The fact that these theories are largely bullshit had been debunked by several contemporary academics and philosophers other than Rose (Foucault’s Law and Order comes to mind) merely by pointing out their initial flaws doesn’t mean that they’re dangerous, however. The way they inherently deny female agency and any hope of a healthy relationship is much more problematic, and explicitely anti-feminist. 

The Symbolic order creates cultural intelligibility through the mutually exclusive positions of “having” the Phallus (the position of men) and “being” the Phallus (the paradoxical position of women). The interdependancy of these positions recall the Hegelian structure…the unexpected dependency of the master on the slave in order to establish his own identity through reflection.

Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (pp60)

So if we understand Rey’s character through the phallogocentric framework, her only role is to allow Kylo to establish his identity through reflection; and Kylo has no hope of redeeming himself, only through ‘enslaving’ Rey. If there’s a fix-it, it’s outside of the framework. Sounds bad? There’s more. 

The naturalization of both heterosexuality and masculine sexual agency are discursive constructions nowhere accounted for but everywhere assumed within this* founding structuralist frame

Ibid (pp58)
* referring to the phallogocentic framework (used in the aforementioned analyses of TLJ)

Any form of homosexuality or female/male equality is impossible within this analytcal framework. The yoni (the vagina; arguably, the cave Rey falls into and the cave on Crait hiding the mother) will always be a lack, a mere vessel for the phallus. Kylo’s inavibility to penetrate the cave or Rey grabbing the phallic lightsaber is not a girlpower moment, because girlpower simply doesn’t exist, isn’t allowed to exist within the phallogocentric framework – and neither does homosexuality. Which might be very well if you headcanon both of them to be 100% straight, but if you apply psychoanalysis to the movie it means that no one else can be gay/bi/pan/ace/anything else either, because the only sexuality allowed within this framework is a compulsory heterosexuality. Please don’t support homophobic theories. Just don’t. Prior to the incest taboo there is a taboo of homosexuality; the primacy of the maternal attraction is arbitrary (Butler again, pp81). 

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