Politics has a sex because sex is our first politics, our first agency, our first subjection. Over the long sweep of history, collective representation, the capacity to stand for the collectivity, to speak in its name, has been gendered. Men have historically dominated the public sphere, their bodies massed, displayed, and sacrificed as the primary medium and content of collective representation. Women are absent, off-stage, or more recently, play minor parts. If the public sphere, and the collective body conjured into symbol there, is male, it presumably has a penis; but the fact is that its sex, its erotic energies, have gone largely un-theorized. If we are to understand the logic of collective representation we must align its symbolization with its sex.

In this chapter, I wish to explore the sexuality of collective representation as achieved in ancient rituals as interpreted by Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud, the founders of sociology and psychoanalysis respectively. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life ([1912] 1995) (hereafter Elementary Forms) and Totem and Taboo ([1913] 1946), both studied the “totemism” of the aboriginal tribes of Australia which they argued was the simplest and hence the earliest religion. For both, collective representation was the creation of a collective body through the individual bodies of men. While scholarship has accumulated requiring revision of the empirical materials upon which they based their theories, their theories are still studied and taught without reference to it, as modalities of thinking, as our own totemic representations.