This essay tackles the controversy of heterosexual-identified women who derive erotic and psychic pleasure from writing and/or reading popular literature in which the central romantic couple is two men. Such narratives are known as M/M fiction and comprise a subgenre within the larger romance market. Criticism directed at this cultural practice often argues that such narratives merely substitute two male bodies for a male/female pair without substantively altering the emotional and sexual dynamics of the relationship. Hence, the male lovers in such narratives are simply acting out a heterosexual fantasy of gay male intimacy. To challenge this view, this essay turns to revisions to Freudian understandings of bisexuality. In so doing, it attempts to relocate this pleasure in the repudiated male identities and homosexual object cathexes that all women are urged to give up in the pre-Oedipal phase as a condition of assuming (hetero)normative gender and sexual subjectivities.
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