whATS TRUIANGULATION OF DESIRE, is it like the psych thing where repressed emotions go elsewhere (sublimination?) but desire?
yes! exactly that! repressed emotions manifesting in more socially acceptable avenues of desire! sedgwick discusses this extensively in between men, but the idea is basically that, in a society governed by patriarchal heterosexuality, homosocial bonds between men function as power maintenance while homosexual bonds are seen as a threat to power. you’re supposed to, as a man, be interested in men (action movies, cars, cowboys, sports) but never interested in men, so whatever interest you do have in men beyond that which is appropriately homosocial must be repressed or filtered in some way, ie through the pursuit of women. the triangulation comes into play in the fact that it’s, well, a triangle — it’s not actually about the man and the woman getting together, it’s about the man pursuing the woman in the vicinity of another man, the actual object of desire. and when looking at destiel, this kind of self-conscious appeal to normative heterosexuality happens constantly. dean acting as cas’s wingman for the waitress who smells like food in 12.12. dean hooking up with the waitress in 12.18 after establishing he’s feeling distanced by cas’s lack of communication. the strip club visit in 13.05 as dean continues to mourn cas. dean having sex with anna and deriving pleasure when she places her hand over cas’s handprint. dean taking cas to the strip club for his last night on earth. dean spending all of scoobynatural chasing daphne and denigrating fred only to end up in the ascot in the final shot (and this isn’t even taking into account the entire history of queer readings of mystery incorporated and the ascot of it all). hell, the hickey dean gets from an anonymous hookup in 11.13, the same episode amara tells him his desire is cloaked in shame! pretty much any moment in season 11 that is supposed to be about dean feeling attraction to amara accidentally bounces back and reads as devotion to cas through this logic. from the cas side, it seems pretty well established that the sex he’s having with women in 5.04 is just his way of coping with dean’s increased stoicism and belligerence, and the sex with april more than anything else feels like an attempt to mimic dean’s understanding of sexuality. sometimes a man having sex with a woman is actually very gay!
