Fantasy of Complementarity

The "fantasy of complementarity" is Ruti's term for the ideological formation that naturalizes heterosexual coupling by encoding sexual difference as a relation of mutual completion: men and women are figured as naturally incomplete halves whose union resolves an originary deficit. As a fantasy in the Lacanian sense, it provides the structural coordinates through which desire is directed — telling subjects not only what to want but why wanting it is natural and inevitable. By presenting the couple as the answer to lack, the fantasy of complementarity performs a decisive ideological operation: it converts structural, constitutive lack (the manque-à-être that is the condition of desire as such) into a manageable, solvable deficit that marriage or the heterosexual bond promises to fill. The fantasy thus functions as a screen — in the double sense of projection surface and concealment — papering over the Real of the non-existence of the sexual relation and substituting a coherent, satisfying fiction in its place.

What makes this fantasy distinctively ideological — and distinctively pernicious in Ruti's argument — is precisely its naturalization function. Unlike racism, which must work to produce and stabilize racial categories against their evident constructedness, heteropatriarchy recruits bodily sexual difference as apparent evidence for its myth of complementarity, rendering the fantasy invisible as fantasy. The ideology operates not through conscious belief but through the libidinal structure of desire itself: the promise of "unalloyed satisfaction" in marriage binds subjects to an institutional arrangement by colonizing the very coordinates of their wanting. This is why the fantasy is difficult to critique from within: its traversal would require exposing not merely a false belief but the entire frame through which relational desire has been organized.

This concept appears in mari-ruti-penis-envy-and-other-bad-feelings-the-emotional-costs-of-everyday-life (p. 78) as part of Ruti's feminist-psychoanalytic critique of the emotional costs of heteropatriarchal ideology. It occupies a precise intersection of several canonical concepts. First, it is a specification of Fantasy: where Fantasy in the canonical Lacanian sense is the structural formula ($◇a) that gives desire its coordinates and simultaneously screens the Real, the fantasy of complementarity names a socially shared and institutionally enforced version of that formula — one that assigns the objet a the face of the other-sexed partner. Second, it is an application of Ideology in the post-Lacanian sense: not a false belief one could simply correct, but a libidinal structure that organizes enjoyment and desire beneath the level of conscious assent, sustained precisely by its naturalization. Ruti's account closely echoes the Žižekian point that ideology requires fantasy as its indispensable supplement, and that ideological critique must address the fantasmatic frame, not merely propositional content.

The concept also engages Lack and Castration, since the fantasy of complementarity functions specifically by promising to resolve the constitutive lack that castration installs — it converts the irreducible manque-à-être into a deficit that the right partner can fill. In doing so, it forecloses the anxiety that accompanies the real of lack (the dread that the gap might close, or conversely might prove unfillable), replacing it with the managed, institutionally supported narrative of mutual rescue. The cross-reference to Naturalization of Gender and Singularity further situates the concept: the fantasy suppresses both the constructed character of gender norms and the irreducible singularity of subjects by reducing relational complexity to a tidy, typological complementarity of "man" and "woman."

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday LifeMari Ruti · 2018 (p.78)

heteropatriarchy perpetuates the idea that men and women are capable of rescuing each other... This fantasy of mutual rescue in turn helps present marriage as a space of unalloyed satisfaction

The phrase "fantasy of mutual rescue" is theoretically loaded because it names the libidinal mechanism by which lack is ideologically managed: "rescue" implies a prior deficit that can be remedied, encoding constitutive lack as solvable incompleteness, while "unalloyed satisfaction" exposes the fantasy's function as a screen against the Real — promising the very closure of desire that, in Lacanian terms, would be catastrophic rather than fulfilling.