Im/Mobility

In Baudelaire and Freud (1977), Leo Bersani posits that psychoanalysis offers a way of understanding sexuality as characterized by the mobility of fantasy, rather than by the content of fetishes or sexual identities, and that this mobility offers the “potential for explosive displacements”. In this meditation, I explore how “mobility” as a concept, understood in Bersani’s sense, helps us think beyond some of the paradoxes, redundancies and aporia in both psy science and queer theoretical models of sexuality. I close by showing how Bersani returned to “mobility” in Homos (1995) and argue that, via this concept, he suggests ways that queer theory itself can avoid becoming a “new normativity”.