Charles Brown
>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 01/27 4:10 PM >>>
Dennis R Redmond wrote:
>There is something quite new about Butler: she's theorizing the lesbian
>movement of the Nineties, in much the same way that Foucault theorized the
>gay lib movement of the Seventies. And she's also saying some interesting
>stuff about the preconditions of contemporary micropolitical movements --
>why it's hard to motivate people to join unions, work in their community,
>resist the ravages of capital, etc.
She's also blurring a lot of the demarcations that 70s gay lib, dare I say, erected. And, more broadly, queering all the identities of race, gender, and preference. Her riff on the lesbian phallus - and the phallus itself as a "transferable phantasm" - is a fine example of this (see below).
>But of course, none of this can be computed on little Excel charts, so
>it's not important to real, loin-girdling disciplines which Crunch Numbers
>and Calculate Graphs
Hey, I spend hours every day doing that sort of thing. It's so refreshing to escape into theory after groping fruitlessly for the elusive kernel of the Real.
Doug
----
[from Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter]
If the phallus is that which is excommunicated from the feminist orthodoxy on lesbian sexuality as well as the "missing part," the sign of an inevitable dissatisfaction that is lesbianism in homophobic and misogynist constructions, then the admission of the phallus into that exchange faces two convergent prohibitions: first, the phallus signifies the persistence of the "straight mind," a masculine or heterosexist identification and, hence, the defilement or betrayal of lesbian specificity; secondly, the phallus signifies the insuperability of heterosexuality and constitutes lesbianism as a vain and/or pathetic effort to mime the real thing. Thus, the phallus enters lesbian sexual discourse in the mode of a transgressive "confession" conditioned and confronted by both the feminist and misogynist forms of repudiation: it's not the real thing (the lesbian thing) or it's not the real thing (the straight thing). What is "unveiled" is precisely the repudiated desire, that which is abjected by heterosexist logic and that which is defensively foreclosed through the effort to circumscribe a specifically feminine morphology for lesbianism. In a sense, what is unveiled or exposed is a desire that is produced through a prohibition.
And yet, the phantasmatic structure of this desire will operate as a "veil" precisely at the moment in which it is "revealed." That phantasmatic transfiguration of bodily boundaries will not only expose its own tenuousness, but will turn out to depend on that tenuousness and transience in order to signify at all. The phallus as signifier within lesbian sexuality will engage the spectre of shame and repudiation delivered by that feminist theory which would secure a feminine morphology in its radical distinctness from the masculine (a binarism that is secured through heterosexual presumption), a spectre delivered in a more pervasive way by the masculinist theory which would insist on the male morphology as the only possible figure for the human body. Traversing those divisions, the lesbian phallus signifies a desire that is produced historically at the crossroads of these prohibitions, and is never fully free of the normative demands that condition its possibility and that it nevertheless seeks to subvert. Insofar as the phallus is an idealization of morphology, it produces a necessary effect of inadequation, one which, in the cultural context of lesbian relations, can be quickly assimilated to the sense of an inadequate derivation from the supposedly real thing, and, hence, a source of shame.
But precisely because it is an idealization, one which no body can adequately approximate, the phallus is a transferable phantasm, and its naturalized link to masculine morphology can be called into question through an aggressive reterritorialization. That complex identificatory fantasies inform morphogenesis, and that they cannot be fully predicted, suggests that morphological idealization is both a necessary and unpredictable ingredient in the constitution of both the bodily ego and the dispositions of desire.
It also means that there is not necessarily one imaginary schema for the bodily ego, and that cultural conflicts over the idealization and degradation of specific masculine and feminine morphologies will be played out at the site of the morphological imaginary in complex and conflicted ways. It may well be through a degradation of a feminine morphology, an imaginary and cathected degrading of the feminine, that the lesbian phallus comes into play, or it may be through a castrating occupation of that central masculine trope, fueled by the kind of defiance which seeks to overturn that very degradation of the feminine.
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.
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...