Penelope Engelbrecht

Women’s Studies
DePaul University
pengelbr@wppost.depaul.edu

 

What do lesbians really want? Animated by an axiomatic awareness that the personal is political, lesbian thinkers in the 80’s and 90’s have extrapolated an astonishing variety of ideologies, theories, and praxes, individually manifesting implicit and explicit longings for everything from better sex toys and babies and domestic partnership benefits to better medical research on women’s health and out tv sit-com characters and radical post-feminist phenomenology. Desire per se has been a hot topic.

 

Striving to clarify what’s crucial to my lesbian reality, to articulate my desire in and of lesbian theory, I myself have defined lesbian Desire, but I am not yet, and may never be, entirely satisfied by (any) theory of Desire.² For me, this inconclusion, which is not unlike philosopher Jacques Derrida’s conception of différance, partially characterizes lesbian Desire.³ To describe just one way that lesbian Desire operates in literary texts entails teasing (a) theory directly from the texts themselves, and I do seek to connect–at least in theory–the often divergent realities of (lesbian) words and deeds, coincidentally suggesting some ways we lesbians enact our Desire(s) in the world. The textuality of the lesbian body, the diverse texts of fictional and/or corporeal lesbian bodies, even the writing of lesbian erotica are all at issue here.

 

In common parlance, “desire” refers to a physiological condition, an affective state, a bodily urge; however, our desires are not simply sensual. I have already argued that I perceive lesbian Desire as an inter/active mode which mediates two synonymous but operatively distinct, performative terms of relation, the lesbian Subject and the lesbian Other/Self. As two lesbians enact these roles, the to and fro of their mutual/ized lesbian Desire(s) emerges as fundamentally mutable, its very essence active mutation, change, motile transformation on the textual (and material) plane(s).⁴ This Brossardian–not quite Lacanian–Desire paradoxically does (not) anticipate failure in its perpetual inconclusiveness, even as it animates jouissance.⁵ In other words, my lesbian Desire does not anticipate exhaustion.

 

Moving to theorize the ENscription of Desire–that is, the simultaneously textual and material, literary and physical writing of Desire–a classical semiotic problem arises.⁶ How can any presumably precise word or fixed sign (re)present this active Desire, which by my own definition denotes that which eludes concreteness or permanence? French feminist thinker Hélène Cixous might describe my pursuit of those signs by which lesbians have enscribed (a) textual, sexual Desire as a sextual activity, yet this verbal portmanteau reiterates the entangled semiotic collusion that I am interrogating here. In its susceptibility to analysis, to deconstruction, no text may be trusted as a repository of stable truth (see note 3). Indeed, one may slip, à la Freud, and pronounce an accidental truth: our words do not always say what we mean, nor mean what we intend to say. Consequently, an exacting consideration of signs (i.e., words) must take into account différance, must note the semiotic differences, the distinctions, the deferred meanings, and the reinforced lack of conventional, conclusive understanding. Where lies the lesbian corpus, the textual body of this différance? Touching upon this “sext” may partially sate my lesbian Desire to know an/other in words, may site a transmaterial zone open to my interpretation.

 

In the erotic texts examined here, the literary and the material planes are closely allied, even co-identified–as when erotica courts and attains a gratified reader response. Or, as Alice Parker has written of Nicole Brossard’s works, “Not the least of the pleasures in store for those who are willing to take the ‘trouble’ to decipher [the] texts is an erotics of reading and of writing. The desiring text becomes a desire for the text” (308). Since all textuality comprises the situation and interpretation of signs,⁷ we may approach the specific matter of lesbian sexual Desire by asking what writing of lesbians-Desiring exhibits the most blatant reliance on (a) semiotic context. Where does one observe lesbian Desire literally enscribed in/by material, corporeal signs? In erotic texts of the mutable lesbian body–in writings about physically altered lesbian bodies, and especially those of mastectomy survivors–we may read the signs (of différance) that, in conclusion, I have termed the “un/marks” of lesbian Desire.⁸ Through the textual analyses, we may in/deed touch upon the (polymorphous) mutability and “disjunctive ‘coming together'” of lesbian Desire.

 

Where, then, are the signs of Desire most vividly, even lividly displayed? The erotica of lesbian sado-masochism lunges into view, for in the s/m context, labile bodies comprise the very material, substantive sites for/of visible signs of (consensual) violence. Consider this abbreviated passage from “The Finishing School,” in Pat Califia’s Macho Sluts in which Berenice (Burn-nice?) is proffering one lesson in Clarissa’s s/m education:

 

Thus far, she had inflicted moderate pain and reddened the skin until it was warm and slightly swollen to the touch, but she had not bruised it. She was not in the habit of marking Clarissa...[but] Clarissa coveted the welts...and often reproached Berenice for withholding them. (70)

 

One might expect Califia to launch directly into a description of the caning Berenice will deliver, but instead she interjects an emotional explanation of their interaction: “the love between them was genuine” (70). Such a mediating love corresponds to–but might not constitute nor exceed–lesbian Desire.

 

Only after this affective contextualization does Califia’s text progress to the actual whipping, the inscribing of Clarissa’s marks. In the common language of lesbian s/m, these welts and bruises signify not only the visual evidence of Clarissa and Berenice’s loving relationship, but also the dynamic of their power relationship: the marks identify Clarissa as the loving and the beloved submissive.⁹ Complementarily, her marks indirectly identify Berenice as dominant, as Actor, as the author and authority who writes her Desire upon the body of the submissive. Berenice is clearly a Subject, and Clarissa seems to occupy the (phallogocentric) position of objectified Other in this binary opposition–Clarissa herself, her body, transformed into Berenice’s text.¹⁰

 

But three specific conditions belie this construction. Foremost, as in all proper s/m scenes, the presumably submissive bottom possesses the power of an ultimate sign, a cryptic, scene-terminating safe word. Were Clarissa merely to pronounce this previously agreed-upon signal (typically some non-sexual yet memorable word, such as “rutabagas”), the dominant Berenice would perforce immediately desist from whichever intolerable acts she was performing. Clarissa has not surrendered the potential of control so much as deferred the exercise of it. Subsequently, Berenice concludes the beating and undertakes Clarissa’s sexual satisfaction–and although “Clarissa babbled pleas for forgiveness and release,” her “whole body begged for more” (Califia 71). In the obliging fulfillment of Clarissa’s concrete demand, via sexual if not entire “release,” Berenice is revealed as only one of two Subjects in the INTER/action, apparently contradicting the s/m objectification construct. Finally, perhaps most importantly, Berenice may wield the cane, the pen with which she writes contusions upon Clarissa’s backside, but Clarissa’s body writes these signs. When struck, the body bleeds within, that blood coloring the skin, that discoloration effecting the bruise, which is the sign. The two women jointly author this bodily text; the emblematic s/m text cannot exist without the co-operation of these two Subjects acting in concert.

 

Hence, lesbian s/m cannot be conclusively circumscribed as a dangerous and perverse mimicry of oppressive, violent hetero-sex, as Julia Penelope, among others, has claimed (see Call 113-131). The presumed s/m power-exchange is a dramatic artifice, a mere construct. Although Elizabeth Meese has remarked that “how the self-defining capacity and the interior imagination free themselves from phallocentric control is not clear,” she has also pointed out that “the moment of desire (the moment when the writer most clearly installs herself in her writing) becomes a refusal of mastery” (Crossing 122/1). The arguably painful text of the lesbian masochist’s bruised body nevertheless signifies consensual lesbian Desire because she has chosen to submit. Her pain constrains, construes her pleasure. In this context, lesbian s/m activity literally embodies the mutability of lesbian Desire and renders the signs of différance. Those bruises write Desire as they appear and fade: the skin enacts, enscribes mutation.

 

Contrary to the views of those who share Julia Penelope’s precise disapproval of it, politically incorrect lesbian s/m might be thought to reconstruct the word violence, which etymologically denotes “the making of a way, a path,” but not necessarily an enforced phallic or politically suspect path.¹¹ A critical distinction between this consensual lesbian s/m neo-violence and the violences that many lesbian/feminists associate with hetero-sex generally–and perhaps with gay male s/m–devolves from the absence of an ostensibly natural master, as these lesbians refuse compulsory penetration by the male subject.¹² The lesbian masochist chooses her momentary, even fictive mistress: amusingly ambivalent, this feminization of “master.” The lesbian sadist is, like her, a lesbian Subject and her equal. Neither s/m role is absolute or essential; one may choose to enact either role, at different moments. To amplify this distinctly lesbian s/m dynamic, consider the self-empowered lesbian Subject as exemplified in “The Succubus,” by Jess Wells. In this short story, a lesbian’s (violent) Desire manifests itself in real bruises, love-bites and other signs rendered by an invisible lover motivated, hallucinated, and/or animated by the protagonist’s own mind. She sadistically dominates her self which masochistically submits to her self. Whatever she thinks of and Desires, her material body sensorily experiences and visibly textualizes–a bizarre and frightening but highly pleasurable experience!¹³

 

Like the celebrated Lesbian Body of Monique Wittig, Wells’ story enscribes a real, if materially implausible, Desire that clarifies the pseudo-oppositional s/m disjunction by collapsing Subject and Other/Self positions into a single, active co-location. In this elision of hierarchical power-over dynamics, the (im)propriety of lesbian s/m begins to look decidedly undecidable, if we forebear to (subjectively, perhaps even sadistically) impose our personal, prohibitive biases on the Desires of others. Yet one might still question the socio-political basis of Wells’ character’s supernatural or psychically configured lesbian self-love. In lesbian “vampirism,” a loaded and persistent hetero-patriarchal tradition at least as archaic as Coleridge’s 200-year-old poem “Christabel,” the lesbian materializes as ghoul, as Succubus (see Case 1-20). The genuinely queer orthodoxy, the sexism and homophobia of such phantasmagorical lesbians are offensive; het/male fantasy here traduces material lesbian praxis, overshadowing it, resituating lesbian women as alien monsters both demonic and seductive, simultaneously dangerous and subject to annihilation. Such textual-cum-theoretical demonization of lesbians is sometimes believed to legitimize real-life queer-bashing.

 

In fact, the destructive, traditional violence men do perpetrate upon objectified lesbian women does appear in lesbian texts, obviously without any positive aspect or erotic significance in itself, yet furthering discussion of bodily mutilation-as-mutation directly, and of mutable lesbian Desire indirectly. Minnie Bruce Pratt’s poem “Waulking Song: Two” discloses two such events: the rape of her lover, and the after-effects of this attack and its residual marks upon the lesbians’ interaction. These excerpted narrative lines depict the initial assault:

 

In the summer haze she had gone to work.
The man with the knife stopped her.
He shoved her from the door to the straggling hedge.
He jerked at her shirt and ripped the seams.

...

He raped her and tried to cut her throat. And he did.
The red of her blood crossed the plaid of her shirt.

...

[Later] She washed the shirt, put it away,
and looked to see what else was torn (Pratt 18)

 

Over time, her slashed throat heals; the poem proceeds to delineate how the raped woman reacts anxiously to any tactile connection. Even the touch of her lesbian lover becomes invested with the potential for violence, violation, yet “She feared that I would not touch her, / would not touch, and that I would” (19).¹⁴ This ambivalence toward even that touch which signifies love comprises différance. Each touch may become the sign of any touch. Is the loving touch unhappily deferred in the automatic recognition of pain, or is the pain perhaps partially deferred by the Desirable contact? Yes–both at once.

 

Pratt enscribes the ambiguity of différance with the sign of the scar upon her lover’s throat. This signifying scar represents the unwelcome hetero-patriarchal violence that lodges between them, as it situates the différance that the violence occasioned. The scar that re/presents painful experience functions as a precursory referent and, thus, as a prime signifier of the sign of the touch, informing the touch with unintended ambivalence (18). Indeed, the mark of the scar may also signify a prohibition–a proscription–of touch: a fearful foreclosure of the potential meaning of, or meaning vested in, a touch which might be interpreted as painful, constituting a Subjective refusal to misread the Other/Self’s loving touch (19). The Subject’s partial interruption of mutual lesbian Desire may seem to threaten the Other/Self’s own Subjectivity; at the least, the disruption is provocative. Therefore, Pratt asserts, “I wanted the red mark to peel / off her throat like a band-aid / so she would be herself / without this pain: unscarred, unchanged” (19). Pratt’s poetic Other/Self Desires to erase the painfully red mark of negative change and its referent, the pain, to undo her lover’s mutilation. But as a sign also of a wound healing, the scar signifies the mutation of the mutilation. That is, the mutilation no longer constitutes a purely negative mutilation per se.

 

Pratt’s poem goes on to outline a process of recognizing this distinction, showing how the lesbian tactile point of contact may be renewed. Lesbian Desire may exist transitionally in or as or via this point of contact.¹⁵ Several pages later in her chronological poetic collection, Pratt notes that “It has been three years; the shirt / was mended, not thrown away…I touch her bare arm…Her flesh is solid, not crumbled to dust…Her scar has faded to a thin white line. / I can touch her breast. I can feel her heart beating” (21-2). Their lesbian Desire briefly interrupted did not rupture, was not occluded, still continues. The mutilated victim has become a scarred survivor. The fresh, red scar had signified divisive violence; the old, white scar corresponds specifically to renewed erotic interchange. The lover’s Desire helps to enable this healing–perhaps partly by constructing this polysemous re-investment of the marked lesbian body, through recognizing multiple signs and their meanings, definitions that themselves metamorphose.

 

The mutable significance of Pratt’s scar resembles the linguistic concept of marked and unmarked adjectives, as Janice Moulton addressed it while dissecting the gender binary, he/she. The unmarked, quasi-generic “he” holds a position of greater positive privilege than the marked “she,” comparable to the positive and negative adjectives “tall” and “short” (219-32). In Pratt’s poem, “scar” changes from a negative, marked sign to an ambivalent, un/marked sign–of différance, I think. The importance of this evaluative referential shift is further exposed in other instances when lesbians have textualized bodily mutilation as neutral or un/marked mutation.¹⁶ As Parker has explicated Brossard, “If language structures reality, then transformation, which would occur in and through language, is possible” (309).

 

The sadly ever-more-common lesbian narratives concerning breast cancer best exemplify the semiotic transformation of mutilation to mutation–and they bespeak a powerful potential to reconfigure negative personal and corporeal perceptions, as well.¹⁷ A clear instance develops in Tee Corinne’s story “Vibrator Party,” which delivers both overt erotica and covert social commentary. After double mastectomy surgery, the once sexually exuberant protagonist, Ali, has been stifled by anxious self-inhibition and self-perception of mutilation. Ali resists attending the impending “orgy” because, as she describes herself in the objectifying third-person, “She’s forty-five and missing some of her chest and very self-conscious.” More pointedly still, she adds, “Don’t you understand? I’m afraid I’ll make people sick. I’ll ruin the party just by being there” (80).¹⁸ That is, Ali misses, mourns the loss of her breasts, and she fears both peer rejection and her own contagion. Yet it’s the absent, carcinogenic breasts which would infect the party–as a sign of mortality. Perhaps worst of all, for Ali, the breast(s) lost cannot any longer signify Desire, erotic potential.¹⁹

 

Of course, once at the party Ali reacts “normally” to the first nude woman she sees by “star[ing] at [her] ample body, unclothed and unmarked” (83), conceiving herself as negatively marked by the mastectomy scars (of) her missing breasts. But then Ali is shocked when Lena, the hostess, emerges from the hot tub one-breasted and surgically scarred (83). Corinne literally constructs these two women as mirror images, for their twin-like scars run in opposite directions.²⁰ Right there on the sundeck, Ali Desires to touch Lena’s scar, remarking that she’d “never seen anyone else’s” (83), her very wording reminiscent of youthful sexual adventures, of “playing doctor” to access knowledge of bodies. By articulating and then enacting this Desire, her new boldness erasing the mysterious encryption of self-understanding through tactile exposure to an Other/Self, Ali is enabled to shed her own clothes, and Lena traces Ali’s scars in return. In this poignant adult version of “if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” the mastectomy scars comprise “private parts” in both euphemistic and moralistic senses; their exposure comprises a significant “transgression.”

 

All the more significant it is, then, that this thematic node, “the ritual of the touching of the scar,” appears to be standard in lesbian mastectomy narratives. For example, in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, the late Audre Lorde wrote of her first sexual encounter with reluctant, one-breasted Eudora that

 

Desire gave me courage, where it had once made me speechless...In the circle of lamplight I looked from her round firm breast with its rosy nipple erect to her scarred chest. The pale keloids of radiation burn lay in the hollow under her shoulder and arm down across her ribs. I raised my eyes and found hers again, speaking a tenderness my mouth had no words yet for. She took my hand and placed it there, squarely, lightly, upon her chest. Our hands fell. I bent and kissed her softly upon the scar... (Zami 166-7)

 

In Lorde’s text as in Corinne’s, the ritualistic act of touching the mastectomy scar signifies both Desire for and acceptance of the supposedly disgusting “mutilated” lesbian body. For Ali, this acceptance is re-doubled through Lena’s “twinning,” and the scar obtains privilege as a shared markof difference: perhaps only the one-breasted woman can understand the breast-less woman (though we all were breastless girls once). As ever in the modality of lesbian Desire, the corporeal touch, the point-of-contact confirms their semiotic collusion.

 

We find that the real transgression lies in rejecting alienation, in refusing the asexual isolation hetero-patriarchal society prescribes for “mutilated women” as well as for lesbians. Just so, Lena provides the (inter/active, communal) context in which Ali recuperates her erotic impulse; together, they demonstrate how willing mutual exposure of our most “private parts” can create an affecting, profound bond. When the orgiastic “vibrator party proper” commences, a more subtle thematic node of the mastectomy narrative emerges: a frustrated Ali masturbates, and as she at last approaches the climax, “Lena’s hand caressed her scars” (86). And she comes–as if those scars comprised a reopened semiotic vulva; as if all Ali’s neglected Desire were situated in those (momentarily unread) marks that signify her “lost” breasts. Simply put, as the scars are eroticized, they become the site(s) of, the signs of, lesbian Desire. Paradoxically, when Lena caresses the scars, she caresses the-breasts-that-are-absent, and via her semiotically disjunctive touch, Lena and Ali indeed come together.

 

This same differential conjunction of material presence-in-absence is clearly reconstructed in another of Audre Lorde’s autobiographical works, The Cancer Journals. Lorde remembers her lover Eudora as “the first woman who totally engaged me in our loving…the night she finally shared the last pain of her mastectomy” (34)–that is, at the moment when the absent breast no longer prohibits lesbian sensuality “by omission,” but (again) presently becomes an active element of Desire. Yet somewhat ironically, after her own mastectomy, Lorde wonders, “What is it like to be making love to a woman and have only one breast brushing against her?” (Cancer 43). She begins to answer this question when she articulates the “new” situation of her surgically altered body:

 

I looked at the large gentle curve my left breast made under the pajama top, a curve that seemed even larger now that it stood by itself. I looked strange and uneven and peculiar to myself, but somehow, ever so much more myself [than when wearing the foreign prosthesis, which could not] undo that reality, or feel the way my breast had felt, and either I would love my body one-breasted now, or remain forever alien to myself. (Cancer 44)

 

Lorde may initially define her new asymmetry as visually strange and self-alienating, but her lesbian Desire, manifested as self-love in the last sentence cited, generates self-acceptance. More importantly, Lorde’s exposure of the geometric contrast of the-breast-beside-a-space-where-another-breast-might-have-been has a foreseeable figural/tropic effect: emphasis.²¹ That space (of the absent breast) magnifies the (present) breast, engrossing its semiotic import as a marker of “the feminine.” Thus, Lorde is“ever so much more [her]self,” a parenthetically one-breasted woman, changed, but not a mutant. She is mutable, Desire-able.

 

Like Lorde, Adrienne Rich also has written (of such) mutable lesbian Desire–not merely as inconclusive, but as eternally deferred, denied, yet present.²² So to enable here a final, critical coordination of différance, lesbian corporeality, and the textuality of Desire, I turn to Rich’s poem “A Woman Dead in Her Forties.” This poem about breast cancer propounds the mastectomy narrative in a particularly pertinent way, not least because it offers a sensitive, divergent, outside perspective. The poem’s first section presents two key thematic nodes: amid a group of women sunbathing, “…you too have taken off your blouse / but this was not what you wanted: / to show your scarred, deleted torso…You hadn’t thought everyone / would look so perfect / unmutilated” (Rich 53). This initial reticence, like that of Ali in Tee Corinne’s story, not only conveys a genuine concern of surgically altered women, but also constructs the counter-scenario to Lena’s and Ali’s mutual and beneficial self-exposures, for the woman in Rich’s poem evidently anticipated some such mutual opportunity, only to be disappointed in her imperfect physical singularity, left psychologically alone and alienated. Such an experience was “not what [she] wanted”; her Desire remained unfulfilled, virtually negated.²³

 

Rich’s wording alludes to, even parallels, Pratt’s multiple investments of the scar as sign. By replacing her blouse, the woman makes the statement, which Rich italicizes, “There are things I will not share / with everyone” (53). She is a Subject who refuses a one-way and thus impossible social pseudo-interaction of Desire, by refusing to share–or here, to just give up–her most personal, private parts. Referring to that “scarred, deleted torso” as “things,” Rich precludes any potential misunderstanding. A mastectomy does not “delete” a torso. Only an ambivalent marker seems to have been erased. Post-mastectomy, the (“other”) breast remains, with the added signifier of the scar(s), a polysemy which Rich perhaps subconsciously proclaims through the equivocal plural word, “things.” Again, the scar is the mark of a breast.

 

But these same scars simultaneously refer to absence: they are a peculiar kind of sign, what I specifically term an “un/mark.” The embodied and visible un/mark refers to presence and absence in one stroke, constructing a sort of situated différance, for neither referent can be privileged or chosen as “the Meaning,” while both are always readable. That is, the mastectomy scar asserts the-breast-and-the-absence-of-it simultaneously. The un/mark constitutes an aporia, a sort of black hole of meaning, where all possible meaning is ambiguous and therefore deferred and where all possible meaning is still presently textualized, enscribed. In a sense, this saturated aporia is co-identifiable with (the enscription of) lesbian Desire. Rich’s mortal friend was not a self-identified lesbian per se, yet Rich writes of their love, their “mute [and mutilated] loyalty” as lesbian Desire deferred (see note 23). Rich admits “we never spoke at your deathbed of your death,” graphing yet another site of deferral–love unvoiced, death unrecognized, but nonetheless final (58).

 

Still, Rich’s echo-like stanzas reiterating the ritual of the touching of the scars most provoke, by writing that weirdly dual reaction, the thrilling, mournful jouissance in and of lesbian Desire: in section one,

 

I want to touch my fingers
to where your breasts had been
but we never did such things (53)

 

and in section eight,

 

I would have touched my fingers
to where your breasts had been
but we never did such things (58)

 

As we’ve seen, such a ritualistic lesbian touch might have re-invested the un/mark of the scar with the dual, progressive referents of pain and healing and of mut(il)ation/acceptance; however, in Rich’s elegiac poem, the polysemous touch appears to be perpetually deferred. In life, they “never did such things.” On the contrary: even as it is written, exactly because it is (now) written, Rich textualizes, “embodies” this (im/possible) lesbian Desire. As she writes “longing to touch” she writes the touch, touches the belovéd’s textual body. In these words themselves, the touch is (made) real. Yet, like the undecidability of différance, this certain textual point-of-contact always is but never can be. This, too, is a saturated aporia. The “mute” love Rich has/had for her friend is no more unreal nor less ephemeral after the woman’s death than when it was merely unvoiced. I am mindful of Wittig’s proposition that “what’s written truly exists.” By writing her Desire, Rich enables a disjunctive coming together of lesbian and lost lesbian outside of time: she and her late friend embrace here, on the page, in the inked letters of the Desiring “we.”

 

This disjunctive coming together elaborates upon the paradox of lesbian jouissance. Not without reason do the exemplary lesbian texts examined here often construe lesbian Desire as a principally erotic mode. By means of Desire, these lesbian writers textualize the body and signify the body itself as a material, indeed sexual, text. Actually, the textual lesbian body constructs a text within a text. Collapsing the distinctions between marks and absent referents, constructing meaningful un/marks, remonstrating that mutilation may or even should be read–or translated–as mutation, with change its very root, the active radical of lesbian Desire operates via the text as the mutable mode and modal referent of lesbian semiotics. Thus, we perpetually revise what is, for a moment, essential.

 

As an active mode, lesbian Desire does not function ambivalently, despite the paradoxes it evokes. The mut(il)ations of the lesbian body incurred by sado/masochistic, surgical, even assaultive means can only be monologized–marked negatively as mutilation alone–in the absence of Desire, as the opening of Rich’s poem has made most painfully clear in conclusion (53). Lesbian corporeal text and touch devolve from the transforming motivation of intangible mutual Desire: in each, in every succeeding moment, each loving “I” beholds you, lover and belovéd, ever as mutable perfections. That phrase, “mutable perfection,” suggests yet another seeming paradox. Although this Desire in theory is situated in the non-space of transactivity, the Desiring and tactile point-of-contact embodies mutability and informs pseudo-fixed signification, and such a complex of Desire can only be described by the polysemous term “in(con)clusive.”

 

This lesbian Desire of mine is inclusive of multiple co-operative Subjects, and so, polymorphous; this Desire is not semiotically unstable, but semiotically vital. Like celestial bodies impossibly approaching the speed of light, the faster our Desire rushes toward some mortal terminus, the slower our relative passage toward that ever-more-anticipated-but-never-reached conclusion. A delicious frustration, this inconclusion. In the textual time warp of lesbian Desire, one’s momentary, Subjective pursuit of self-knowledge is endlessly prolonged by the infinite gravity of each Other/Self, the allure of the as-yet-unknown becoming provocative, each Pandoran revelation revising everything that came before. And more is always possible, if we so Desire, if there’s time. In our perpetual (ex)changing, our Desire is ever-fresh. Vive la différance! For always already we enact and enscribe our lesbian Desire as and in the un/mark of the lesbian text, as and in the multiply-meaningful (w)hole of the lesbian corpus. In terms of lesbian Desire, perhaps as always, (lesbian) context is everything. Or, as Nicole Brossard and Elizabeth Meese might conjunctively remark, lesbian Desire writes the lesbian body : writing.

 

Notes

 

1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at “Flaunting It: First National Graduate Student Conference on Lesbian and Gay Studies,” University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 4/19/91. This later incarnation has benefitted from the insightful critique of three anonymous Postmodern Culture reviewers, and from the critical input of Jennifer F. Ash, William J. Spurlin, and Laura Stempel Mumford–all of whom I thank. Although the essay’s original audience was composed of academics, I’ve tried to keep the essay accessible for lay readers: endnotes explain and/or illustrate the more exotic academic terms.

 

2. To cite relevant lesbian thinkers and their works guarantees sins of omission. Still, I acknowledge the multifarious influences especially of Jeffner Allen, Dorothy Allison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Susie Bright, Nicole Brossard, Judith Butler, Pat Califia, Lillian Faderman, Diana Fuss, Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Meese, Joan Nestle, Julia Penelope, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Adrienne Rich, and Monique Wittig, each of whom has specifically contributed to my understanding of lesbian Desire. In addition, my theorizing draws on the works of such phallocratic thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, most often oppositionally, sometimes appositively, and always informed by astute feminist interlocutors: in particular, Jane Gallop and Elizabeth Grosz (re: Lacan), and Gayatri Spivak (re: Derrida).

 

For varied further reading on “lesbian Desire,” see Karla Jay’s Lesbian Erotics and Grosz and Probyn’s Sexy Bodies, two recent anthologies. Teresa De Lauretis’ expansive and much-touted theoretical study, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire takes a (to me) troubling sort of “late patriarchal” psychoanalytic tack on the construction of lesbian desire: see Grosz’s critical review in differences 6.2+3, and note 8 below. Also see Grosz’s Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, especially. chapter 6, “The Body as Inscriptive Surface.”

 

3. This French term, différance, combines the idea of difference with that of deferral. In the practice of deconstructive criticism, différance refers to the way we define words (and concepts and objects) not only by identifying their characteristics, but also by noticing absent, disqualifying characteristics. For example, we may decide that a four-legged, fur-covered carnivore with a tail is a “cat” and is not a “dog” by observing the presence of retractable claws and by noting the absence of a bark. Thus, we understand the “meaning” of words partly through identifying pairs of extremes (i.e., binary oppositions). Derrida’s concept of différance further suggests that every word not only “means what it means,” but is also always hinting at (but putting off or deferring) “that which it does (not) mean,” its opposite or negation. To dissever these multiple meanings, or signs, is one way to perform deconstruction.

 

4. The word “material” is used here in the philosophical sense, to mean “real, concrete; corporeal, physical…” My on-going theoretical project focuses on conjunction(s) of lesbian textuality, subjectivity, corporeality, and culture. A more detailed discussion of the lesbian Subject, the lesbian Other/Self, and lesbian Desire, particularly as distinguished from oppressively “universal” concepts of subject, object, and desire, is developed in my earlier essay “‘Lifting Belly is a Language’: The Postmodern Lesbian Subject,” especially pp. 86, 102ff. Unlike Lacan, for example, I am not pretending to offer the “universal” theory of desire; rather, I am concerned specifically to develop a (not “the”) theory which comprehends lesbian Desire. Hence, I distinguish the “universalizing” usages from my specific usages by capitalizing lesbian “Desire,” etc., as proper nouns.

 

For various reasons, earlier readers of this essay have voiced concern over whether (or how) my interpretation of “lesbian Desire” verges on some sort of essentialism–a supposed academic heresy. Yet I remain unconvinced of the need for anathematic–even knee-jerk–rejection of so-called essentialism. In discussing “the” (lesbian, corporeal, biologically structured) female body, I deploy a provisional version of essence comparable to that “strategic essentialism” discussed by Spivak (“In a Word. Interview” with Ellen Rooney). So while I am cautious of positing essential categories or concepts, if only because of their potential to universalize personal experience, I also “admit” I am interrogating the possibilities for a theory of lesbian Desire beside(s) or beyond one rigidly captive to (binaristic) anti-essentialism. That is, I am exploring how a lesbian theory might “resolve” the incessant tip-toeing around relativistic, indeterminate, and ultimately immaterial (if not quite nihilistic) High Theory ideas with little bearing on any lesbian “reality.” I want theory that’s not mere academic gobbledy-gook, but that has some relevance to (at least my own) lesbian “real life,” one that might coordinate “common sense” (i.e., a sort of essentialism) with poststructural rationalism.

 

One more caveat may prove useful here: I cannot express notable interest or expertise in applications of this lesbian theory to hetero-patriarchal relations, which are beyond the scope of this essay, in any case. It is not my task, as a “lesbian theorist,” to make (a) lesbian theory inclusive of hetero-patriarchal ideologies, or to presume to speak “for” straights–or even for gay men. On the contrary, only at this late date in history can a lesbian theory be forwarded in public at all, and I think it’s politically important for straight and other non-lesbian readers to sidestep or minimize or re-examine their hegemonic biases, so as to apprehend this lesbian theory in and of itself, before they seek further rapprochement.

 

5. Nicole Brossard, a French-Canadian lesbian, has written several important works of lesbian philosophy/theory/fiction (so-called fiction théorique). Her Aerial Letter puts a distinctly lesbian spin on various concepts more closely associated with the late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacanian jouissance, which is considered untranslatable, can be said to carry the duplicit meanings of spiritual ecstasy and sexual ecstasy, of horrible joy, all in one superlative package. Jouissance names the con/fusing experience of joyous laughing which inexplicably dissolves into sorrowful tears. This lesbian Desire which I construe does exhibit some similarities to Lacanian desire (e.g., its paradoxicality), yet is more closely allied with a Brossardian contextual description.

 

Both Brossard and Lacan advance social theories which are characterized by their membership in eurocentric Western civilization. The distinction between a Brossardian lesbian Desire and a Lacanian universalized desire lies in their differing essences. Lacan’s theory relies on the essential significance of the Phallus and the Law, in an inherently patriarchal, heterosexist, legalistic, and power-oriented construction. Brossard’s theorizing concerns what is essentially lesbian- and female-correlated, egalitarian, communicative, and con/text-oriented. From a Brossardian point-of-view, Lacan’s Phallus is not only irrelevant, but also praxically invisible. Lesbians and heterosexuals (for example) all being people, some theoretical congruencies do occur between Brossard and Lacan, but the distinctions are more crucial. I see Lacan’s theory as codifying the hetero-patriarchal foundation of the Western psyche (and culture), while Brossard visibly resists (and partially displaces) that pervasive infrastructure and its exigencies. See also note 10.

 

6. See my “‘Lifting Belly is a Language’: The Postmodern Lesbian Subject” for initial discussion of the term “enscribe” (esp. 86).

 

7. I.e., texts comprise all things which we can “read” or interpret, including writing, or road signs, or body language, etc. To recap a famously amusing (if extreme) example, pop culture critic Tom Wolfe has claimed he learned to interpret ownership of a trendy Barcelona chair as signifying the real or imagined aroma of soiled diapers (61).

 

8. Although this essay considers texts of “altered” lesbian bodies, it does not exhaust all related sub-categories; e.g., such intentional (and “permanent”) body-alteration processes as tattooing and scarification are omitted here, not least for brevity. See Vale and Juno’s Re/Search #12: Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment & Ritual, Chris Wroblewski’s pictorial Tattooed Women, and the Kathy Acker interview in Vale and Juno’s Re/Search #13: Angry Women (177-185). This essay addresses texts selected according to semiotic and (perhaps subjectively) erotic criteria, not taxonomic ones. I do observe, ex post facto, that the chosen texts occupy certain sub-categories: lesbian-s/m-sex-applied impermanent marks, male-assault-inflicted permanent marks, and the surgically rendered permanent marks of mastectomy scars, together inadvertently constructing a range of (increasing probability of) morbidity.

 

I have somewhat reluctantly considered a more provocative elision: since the (literary) texts discussed here present wounded bodies, one might ask whether lesbians fetishize wounds–perhaps in contrast to heterosexual women–and why. Accepting the (Freudian language of) lesbian fetishization of wounds would lead me to interrogate the relation between an invasive wound, an opening in the flesh, and the apparently open structure of female genitalia, possibly reified vis-à-vis some imaginable childhood psychic trauma. Such a process vests psycho-sexual meaning in wounds through an over-simplistic, linear, causal sequence of events, as if an invasive wounding were always/ever pleasurable, and it imposes a monological, phallocentric, pathologized Master-Meaning of the wounds that forecloses any/all other readings, as if all invasions of the body were always/only sexual. I cannot accept such a per/version of the embodied marks under scrutiny here. To recast (all) lesbian Desire as essentially or entirely sexual and obsessively directed to psycho-sexual gratification, which is what Freudian fetishizing connotes, not only overrates that insidiously pathologizing psychoanalytic construct, but also oversimplifies lesbian Desire.

 

I am concerned here with textual signs, with marks upon body surfaces, not with three-dimensional flesh, and I cannot delimit the readings of those signs to a single potentiality of Desire. It’s a mistake to assume that the selected lesbian texts here comprehend all lesbian Desire(s). Here, it’s more a case of accepting bodily realities, from wounds to wrinkles, than of fetishizing anything, and this accepting attitude only seems perverse from a heteropatriarchal perspective which demands that women pursue perfect physical beauty and reject or disguise corporeal evidence of imperfection, such as scars (e.g., by means of expensive plastic surgeries). This sexist attitude is one which I and many other women reject.

 

9. Note the highly appropriate double entendre: “submissive” stems from the Latin submittere, which means “under + to send” (or vice versa). The two roots sub- and “missive” may be rendered in English as literally “under + the letter”…perhaps not of the Law.

 

10. Feminist theorists use “phallogocentric” to name that male-self-centered, heterosexist, patriarchal notion that The Phallus and The Word (logos) together comprise The Center of The Universe, especially in Western culture. The term alludes to Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of the Law and/or the Phallus (theoretically not to be equated with a mere organic penis) which represents the ultimate Object of one’s desire. The powerful desiring one is the subject, who is male-by-definition; the object of desire is, therefore, both the phallus/penis and the woman who is the phallus (see objet petit à). Subject (male) and object (female) positions are similar to the subject and object slots in grammar: first-person I to address second-class, second-person you, respectively. Because the object seems inherently alien to the ostensibly all-knowing subject, the object may also be called the Other. The female object/other is treated as if “it” were a thing, not as a (human) equal of the subject (i.e., he who subjects…).

 

I am arguing that a lesbian feminist theory cannot adopt such oppressive terms and the (Lacanian) concept they re/present, when trying to describe lesbian textual or material relations. Rather, I perceive each lesbian Subject in a two-way relation with an “Other/Self” who is not an object, who operates on an equal basis, who “is” in fact another lesbian Subject, different from oneself, and thus “Other,” but not diminished or degraded in or by difference, so equally a “Self.” My view differs notably from that of Lacan because I do not perceive (or delimit) the Other/Self as an objectified “projection” or “reflection” of an omnipotent, egocentric subject: a critical condition which I think (re-)configures the dynamics of Desire in a lesbian context. See also notes 4, 5, 8.

 

11. Note the typical phallogocentric connotation of “violence” as forcing a way. See “violation.”

 

12. William Spurlin has questioned my implicit distinctions between lesbian and gay male s/m practices. While I refer here primarily to anecdotal, apparent conventional wisdom among some lesbian feminists, and admit the superficial resemblances of most s/m practices regardless of sexual preference, I’d suggest that there appears to be a notable difference between the power-dynamic construction(s) of these praxes. Prior to the s/m situation of two gay men, both may be designated as phallogocentric subjects (in the patriarchal, Lacanian sense); subsequently, one man–perhaps momentarily–defers his subjective power to act as an object, though he is not the/an other. Not only is phallogocentric subjectivity of a lesbian theoretically impossible, but also no heteropatriarchal social foundation for the empowered subjectivity of either the lesbian sadist or masochist exists, putting to question whether the lesbian masochist adopts the objective deferral of power or simply enacts a naturalized condition, as a (Lacanian) object. However, I do think that a lesbian Subjectivity operates according to the parameters I’ve described in this essay and elsewhere, even in lesbian s/m.

 

My understanding of how lesbian s/m differs significantly from s/m performed by heterosexual couples derives from similar principles. In a male-dominant and submissive-female interaction, heterosexual s/m replicates a classic phallogocentric/Lacanian construct; however, I’m under the impression that most heterosexual s/m encounters involve female dominatrix and submissive-male interactions: apparently the flip-side of the hegemonic imperative! In such a case, I think that the seeming power/subjectivity of the female sadist can be enacted only as a gesture of the male subject’s pretense of subjection; i.e., he chooses to permit her to inflict pain on his body, and so the male subject remains the ultimate subject, the female, the mere objectified instrument of his pleasure, her pseudo-empowerment the mere effect of his power.

 

One could perhaps infer that my discussion of the un/marks of lesbian Desire replicates a reading of courtly love à la Lacan. But I would argue that courtly love itself constitutes a construction identical to the heterosexual s/m dynamics I describe above, in which the illusion of female empowerment is entirely the prerogative of the male subject, his service of the Lady dramatized for his pleasure. But the lesbian un/mark signifies–at least in lesbian s/m–the prerogative of a lesbian Subject, who is a momentarily passive Other/Self, acting in concert with a lesbian Subject. I think the co-operative lesbian Subjectivities engender a significant distinction, especially in terms of the authorial investiture of meaning in the un/mark.

 

For further discussion of lesbian s/m in its socio-political aspects, see Califia’s essay collection, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex, especially “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality” (157-64), and “Feminism and Sadomasochism” (165-74).

 

13. See the hysterical/ecstatic physical manifestations of (Christ-like) religious stigmata, e.g., as experienced by Theresa Neumann in the 20th century; or by the medieval mystic Catherine of Siena, whose stigmata were invisible–veritable un/marks indeed–as Jennifer Ash has reminded me.

 

14. See Allen’s stark, thought-provoking analysis of experiencing (a) rape, in Lesbian Philosophy: Explorations (27-59).

 

15. Given space, I would elaborate the idea of tacility as a principle means of lesbian semiotics, textuality, interactivity, and Desire: a means unlike the distancing and hierarchical scopic/visual mode central to hetero-patriarchal subjectivity, yet not analogous to the silent and unknowing corporeality informing the traditional Western view of Woman from Eve onward.

 

16. I think that such mutilation-qua-mutation is re/presented particularly by permanent signs, rather than by means of temporary ones. That is, the sort of impermanent, self-mutating mark inflicted by the s/m practices excerpted from Califia’s “The Finishing School” does not qualify as mutilating because, in the s/m context, such marks are always considered to be positive, unmarked signs (though outsiders may hold a contrary opinion). This equation of positive marks and “unmarked signs” presents another paradoxical variant of the différance I’m describing.

 

17. Valuable personal, practical, and affirmative lesbian/feminist perspectives on surviving breast cancer and related women’s health matters are presented in Midge Stocker’s anthologies Cancer as a Women’s Issue: Scratching the Surface and Confronting Cancer, Constructing Change: New Perspectives on Women and Cancer.

 

18. Duane Allen first drew my attention to the intersecting experiences of lesbian mastectomy survivors and gay male PWA’s; members of both groups may suffer through similar self-criticism and irrational social ostracism. Both AIDS and breast cancer are perceived within the gay and lesbian communities, respectively, as sexuality-related pathological conditions, though for different reasons; the real physical threat of these diseases to each individual in his or her community instills the fear which motivates (misdirected) anxiety toward an already-stricken person.

 

Furthermore, Chicago queer journalist Jon-Henri Damski has publicly “come out” about himself suffering breast cancer, reminding us that men do have breasts, that breast cancer is not always female trouble, just as no one is immune to AIDS.

 

19. This essay avoids addressing the breast as a generic marker of the feminine (i.e., of woman-ness) because I myself do not consider the possession/display of a visible bust essential to being female. Breasts may be incidentally correlatable to womanliness, and to lesbian Desire, but are not axiomatic. Let’s also not overlook that pre-operative male-to-female transsexuals may have both visible female breasts and male genitalia, a visually confusing situation in which the penis is often interpreted as the essential gender characteristic by everyone but the transsexual herself. In short, the reader should not generalize from the character Ali’s initial equation of “lost breasts” and “lost Desire and erotic potential.” Likewise, I notice but pass on the potential to interpret Ali’s “carcinogenic breasts as signs of mortality” as a binaristic, negative corollary of “the breast as emblem of life.” The explication of maternal/reproductive metaphors diverges too widely from my topic and purposes.

 

20. Here, I acknowledge the general influence of Tucker Pamella Farley, whose paper “‘Self and Nonself’: Reflections on a Medical Construction of (Dis)Ease” was presented at the Modern Language Association convention, in Chicago, 1990.

 

21. This rhetorical effect again echoes linguistic discussions of marked and unmarked terms. See Moulton (228-9) and Penelope (Speaking 101ff).

 

22. See also Pratt 26.

 

23. Because Adrienne Rich’s theoretical concept of a lesbian continuum identifies as lesbian all variations of woman-woman contact, from the most casual to the most sexual, I here attribute a lesbian Desire to Rich’s one-breasted straight friend as Rich textualizes her. A woman need not ever perform explicit lesbian sexual acts to experience a lesbian Desire, I think. However, Laura Mumford has prompted me to see how Rich’s willingness to arrogate every individual woman’s right to self-identification (of sexual orientation) by pre-emptive means of this all-inclusive continuum poses at least an ethical problem, namely vis-à-vis “straight” women. See Rich’s widely available 1980 manifesto, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, originally published in Signs 5.4.

 

Works Cited

 

• Allen, Jeffner. Lesbian Philosophy: Explorations. Palo Alto, CA: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1986.
• Califia, Pat. “The Finishing School.” Macho Sluts. Boston: Alyson, 1988. 63-83.
• —. Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis Press, 1994.
• Case, Sue-Ellen. “Tracking the Vampire.” differences 3.2 (Summer 91): 1-20.
• Corinne, Tee. “Vibrator Party.” Lovers: Love and Sex Stories. Austin, TX: Banned Books, 1989. 79-87.
• De Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.
• Engelbrecht, Penelope J. “‘Lifting Belly is a Language’: The Postmodern Lesbian Subject.” Feminist Studies 16.1 (Spring 90): 85-114.
• Grosz, Elizabeth. “The Labors of Love. Analyzing Perverse Desire: An Interrogation of Teresa de Lauretis’s The Practice of Love.” differences 6.2+3 (Summer-Fall 94): 274-295.
• —. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.
• Grosz, Elizabeth and Elspeth Probyn, eds. Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1995.
• Jay, Karla, ed. Lesbian Erotics. New York: New York UP, 1995.
• Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1980.
• —. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1982.
• Meese, Elizabeth A. Crossing the Double-Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986.
• —. “Theorizing Lesbian: Writing–A Love Letter.” Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, eds. Karla Jay & Joanne Glasgow. New York: New York UP, 1990. 70-87.
• Moulton, Janice. “The Myth of the Neutral ‘Man’.” Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, eds.. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. 219-232.
• Parker, Alice. “Nicole Brossard: A Differential Equation of Lesbian Love.” Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, eds. Karla Jay & Joanne Glasgow. New York: New York UP, 1990. 304-329.
• Penelope, Julia. Call Me Lesbian: Lesbian Lives, Lesbian Theory. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1992.
• —. Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues. New York: Pergamon Press, 1990.
• Pratt, Minnie Bruce. “I Do Not Wait” and “Waulking Song: Two.” We Say We Love Each Other. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1985. 26, 17-24.
• Rich, Adrienne. “A Woman Dead in Her Forties.” The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978. 53-58.
• —. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Denver, CO: Antelope, 1982.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty with Ellen Rooney. “In a Word. Interview.” differences 1.2 (Summer 89): 124-156.
• Stocker, Midge, ed. Cancer as a Women’s Issue: Scratching the Surface. Women/Cancer/Fear/Power series, vol 1. Chicago: Third Side Press, 1991.
• —. Confronting Cancer, Constructing Change: New Perspectives on Women and Cancer. Women/Cancer/Fear/Power series, vol 2. Chicago: Third Side Press, 1993.
• Vale, V. and Andrea Juno, eds. Re/Search #13: Angry Women. San Francisco: Re/Search, 1991.
• —. Re/Search #12: Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment & Ritual. San Francisco: Re/Search, 1989.
• Wells, Jess. “The Succubus.” The Dress / The Sharda Stories. San Francisco: Library B Productions, 1986. 71-78.
• Wittig, Monique. The Lesbian Body (Les corps lesbien). Trans. David LeVay. New York: Avon, 1976.
• Wolfe, Tom. From Bauhaus to Our House. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981.
• Wroblewski, Chris. Tattooed Women. London: Virgin, 1992.