> It is important to underscore, however, the way in which the stability of
> both "masculine" and "feminine" morphologies is called into question by a
> lesbian resignification of the phallus which depends on the crossings of
> phantasmatic identification. If the morphological distinctness of "the
> feminine" depends on its purification of all masculinity, and if this
> bodily boundary and distinctness is instituted in the service of the laws
> of a heterosexual symbolic, then that repudiated masculinity is presumed by
> the feminized morphology, and will emerge either as an impossible ideal
> that shadows and thwarts the feminine or as a disparaged signifier of a
> patriarchal order against which a specific lesbian-feminism defines itself.
> In either case, the relation to the phallus is constitutive - an
> identification is made which is at once disavowed.
I.e. the phallus is not just any signifier, but the *hegemonic cultural mediation* through which gender and gender politics are transcribed. Think of the streamlined anorexia of the average Hollywood starlet, or the no less streamlined masculine look purveyed by Leo DiCaprio: even if the actor in question is lesbian, gay or whatever, it's the bodily politics of their performance in the film, TV series or whatever which determines their cultural capital. The "laws of the heterosexual symbolic" is a fancy way of saying "the marketplace of identity". And like any marketplace, the thing is chockful of contradictions, antagonisms, repressions and rebellions, which we as good little radicals ought to be carefully studying, analyzing, critiquing and occasionally even joining.
> Indeed, it is this disavowed identification that enables and informs the
> production of a "distinct" feminine morphology from the start. It is
> doubtless possible to take account of the structuring presence of cross-
> identifications in the elaboration of the bodily ego, and to frame these
> identifications in a direction beyond a logic of repudiation by which one
> identification is always and only worked at the expense of another. For the
> "shame" of the lesbian phallus presumes that it will come to represent the
> "truth" of lesbian desire, a truth which will be figured as a falsehood, a
> vain imitation or derivation from the heterosexual norm. And the
> counterstrategy of confessional defiance presumes as well that what has
> been excluded from dominant sexual discourses on lesbianism thereby
> constitutes its "truth." But if the "truth" is, as Nietzsche suggests, only
> a series of mistakes configured in relation to one another or, in Lacanian
> terms, a set of constituting meconnaissances, then the phallus is but one
> signifier among others in the course of lesbian exchange, neither the
> originating signifier nor the unspeakable outside. The phallus will thus
> always operate as both veil and confession, a deflection from an
> erotogenicity that...
This is a smart move: instead of throwing out the phallus completely and pretending that the objective laws of the marketplace of identity can be overturned with a few slogans (the micropolitical equivalent of the sectarian anti-capitalist who thinks that saying "capitalism sucks" over and over again equates to a genuine revolution), she emphasizes the objectivity of the thing amidst the utopian field of "lesbian exchange", i.e. the ideal of free and fair exchange, where no person's identity would be oppressed, canalized, neocolonized or usurped by any other. What's lacking here, though, is a more general notion of community, i.e. the problem of relating all this to gay liberation, African America struggles, feminism, etc. etc. etc. Might communities, do, experience something like free and equal exchange? They might, but they don't, because we exist in bureaucratic networks of power and domination called "corporations" which mostly prevent this from happening, and set each community at war with every other one.
-- Dennis