Lesbian 'Phallus' or Gratuitous Rudeness? (was Re: Cop Shows....)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Feb 3 07:48:27 PST 1999


Angela wrote:
>i doubt it too yoshie - that butler was recommending such stuff....
>but, rudeness, narcissistic aggression and snobbery are pretty
>standard fare on lists.

True enough. Perhaps e-lists aren't very good places to have any conversations.


>i will say that calling on kelley's outburst,
>when the guys who do this don't get pulled up is also standard. that
>you'd then designate this as 'the Lesbian Phallus',

Rude guys are easier to handle, don't you think? They tend to express their rudeness in a very simple and simplistic manner. (They call you, on some lists, when they really hate you or they feel like they are losing their arguments, a 'cunt' if you are a woman, a 'cocksucker' if you are a man, or some such thing.) That said, on this list the guys whose posts I read don't seem to be rude. Maybe you are generous + curious enough to read a wider range of guys.

I said the 'Lesbian Phallus' because we are supposed to be having (or supposed to have had?) the JudyFest, and in connection with Butler, I've been thinking of how the concept of performance in particular (but also post-structuralism in general) has become more and more _voluntaristic_, as it has become more widely disseminated and (how shall I say) Americanized (or Anglo-Americanized?).

Closer to its putative beginnings, pomo had more of a pleasant anti-humanist flavor. 'Performance' didn't mean 'putting on an act' or switching from one persona to another as an act of will or even whim; it referred to the construction of sexed/gendered subjects (and their vicissitudes) that does not go through the realm of consciousness. Now the subject of free will seems to have made a comeback through a back door, as it were, seizing the commonsense meanings of the word performance. Kelley performing rudeness, narcissism, etc. becomes annoying in this context even more, because in a sense she's defining away, through her performance, all things of interest from the concept of performance, all this pomo verbiage becoming a mere alibi for her doing what she likes to do. Thus my reference to the sad fate of the Lesbian Phallus.

Yoshie



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list