I hope to show here how the notion of culture that becomes transmuted into the "symbolic" for Lacanian psychoanalysis is very different from the notion of culture that remains current within the contemporary field of cultural studies, such that the two entrerprises are oftem understood as hopelessly opposed. I also plan to argue that any claim to establish the rules thar "regulate desire" in an inalterable and eternal realm of law has limited use for a theory that seeks to understand the conditions under which the social transformation of gender is possible.
Gender; Culture; Cultural Studies; Psychoanalysis