How to Raise a Wayward Theory

The impasses traced in earlier chapters—between psychic life and symbolic form, dependency and disavowal—do not resolve here. They gather weight. This chapter asks what it means to theorize from impasse rather than against it. I turn to theorists who remain inside such contradictions, treating them as conditions of thought, writing, and survival. The question becomes: what must gender theory endure when coherence falls apart? One section turns to the child—not as developmental subject but as a saturated figure of adult phantasy, cultural mandate, and psychic contradiction—through whom questions of dependency and futurity are staged. Other sections follow how gender circulates in symbolic configurations of transmission, misrecognition, and interpretive excess. Across these frameworks, psychic life is inseparable from the ways gender is taken up, invested, defended, and symbolized—shaped by histories it cannot fully integrate, by tensions and desires that persist in repetition. To theorize gender here is to stay near its strangeness.