That Was Then: This Is Now: Ex-Changing the Phallus
| September 25, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 04, Number 1, September 1993 |
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Lynda Hart
Department of English
The University of Pennsylvania
In A Taste for Pain, Maria Marcus recounts an anecdote about a women’s studies conference in 1972. Germaine Greer, the keynote speaker, was interrupted by a young woman from the audience who suddenly cried out: “But how can we start a women’s movement when I bet three-quarters of us sitting in this room are masochists?” Greer replied: “Yes, we know women are masochists–that’s what it’s all about!”1
Twenty years later, I am more likely to hear the complaint that all women are masochists in the context of lesbians lamenting the scarcity of tops in the community. Whether they are “real” butches, or the newly popular femme- tops, a good top is hard to find; most lesbians prefer being bottoms.
While feminists continue to debate the pros and cons of lesbian sexual practices, “masochism,” the term that has become synonomous for some feminists with internalized oppression, has undergone a theoretical renaissance in which the erotics of submission have been reclaimed by a diverse group of scholars as an emancipatory sexuality for men. Indeed if we are to follow Leo Bersani’s argument, which strikingly concludes that “sexuality–at least in the mode in which it is constituted–could be thought of as a tautology for masochism,” anti-s/m feminist arguments would be tantamount to barring women from sex altogether.2
For feminists who are struggling to articulate a sexual subjectivity that does not submit to the psychoanalytic imperative of an exclusively masculine libido, which ineluctably consigns femininity to a masculinized fetish, Bersani’s theory might be welcomed since it takes us out of the discourse of the symptom into a “nonreferential version of sexual thought.” Parental identifications, which inevitably reify Oedipus, are no longer constitutive; and the “lost object,” which is relentlessly relegated to a feminized fetish, is diffused so that any object and any part of the body can become an erotogenic zone.3 This theory does not of course undo the historical/social attribution of masochism to women, but it does suggest a psychic model in which the sexual positions one takes up are not necessarily gendered. Nevertheless, Bersani implicitly assumes the now privileged masochistic position as a male preogative, and hence claims sexuality itself for men. This presumption is clearer in his essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” when he describes the dominant culture’s revulsion at the sight of a man seductively and intolerably imaged with “legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.”4
This is a graphic enactment of Freud’s third form of masochism, “feminine masochism,” which he also presumes to be occupied by a male subject in a feminine situation. The male subject in this space signifies “being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby.”5 Since women presumably already experience one or more of the above, the notion of a feminine “feminine masochism” is redundant at best, if not impossible. In short, linguistically masculine feminine masochism is performative; feminine feminine masochism is constative. The latter merely reports an adequation; it corresponds with the “facts.” The feminist campaign to free women from their masochism was never then about giving up something that they had, but extricating women from something that they were.
Although Kaja Silverman acknowledges that psychoanalytic sexual difference relegates female masochism to a virtually ontological condition when she defends her focus on male subjectivity by explaining that the female subject’s masochism is difficult to conceptualize as perverse because it represents “such a logical extension of those desires which are assumed to be ‘natural’ for the female subject,” she nonetheless accepts and repeats the terms of a psychoanalytic symbolic in which there is only one libido and it is masculine.6 Women are denied sexual agency because they are incapable of mimesis. Their options are to take up the position of passive “normal femininity,” or to reverse the position and appropriate masculine subjectivity and its desires, in which case they can “perform” sexuality, but only through their “masculinity complex.” Bersani’s desire is aimed at the pleasures gay men might experience from an alignment with femininity, as is Silverman’s, though her project is to produce a revolutionary subject in a “feminine” yet heterosexual man. Both of these analyses add weight to feminist arguments against sadomasochism, for following their logic the lesbian masochist is either enacting the dominant culture’s degradation of women or she is playing out the desire to be a man. Even if she psychically occupies the position of a man with another man, she is still only a “fag hag” within the terms of sexual difference. These theories that posit male masochism as emancipatory thus continue to depend on the impossibility of desire between women. In this context, truth claims about lesbian sexuality such as this one made by Jan Brown,
We practice the kind of sex in which cruelty has value, where mercy does not. What keeps those of us who refused to abandon our "unacceptable" fantasies sane is the knowledge that there are others like us who would not leave because we scream "Kill me," at the moment we orgasm. . . . We lied to you about controlling the fantasy. It is the lack of control that makes us come, that has the only power to move us . . . . 7
would easily fall prey to the argument that lesbian sadomasochists are merely reproducing heterosexist models, or at best, male homosocial ones. The referent for Brown’s “lies” can be located in earlier rhetoric by s/m practitioners who justified the acting out of their fantasies by claiming they were means of exorcising their real hold on the individual. Tacitly accepting the feminist contention that s/m lesbians had internalized cultural misogyny, these defenses asked for a tolerant reprieve, a period of playing through the fantasies in order to transcend them. S/M then, ironically, became therapeutic, like a homeopathic cure.
Theatrical metaphors were central to this defense. Susan Farr, for example, described s/m as “pure theatre,” “a drama [in which] two principals . . . act at being master and slave, play at being fearsome and fearful.” She cites the clues to the drama in the interchangeability of the roles and the repetitive, scripted dialogue. Even though, she acknowledges, much of the scene may be “pure improvisation,” it is still “theater.”8 This dialectic between the scriptural and the spontaneous is prevalent in early pro s/m accounts. On the one hand, there is the insistence that the scene is rigidly controlled, with a decided emphasis on the bottom’s mastery of the limits. On the other hand, the eroticism depends on the anticipation that the limits will be pushed to the breaking point, that the “scene” will cross over into the “real.”
To a certain extent, the controversy about whether s/m is “real” or performed is naive, since we are always already in representation even when we are enacting our seemingly most private fantasies. The extent to which we recognize the presence of the edge of the stage may determine what kind of performance we are enacting, but willing ourselves to forget the stage altogether is not to return to the real, as s/m opponents would have it; rather, this will to forget is classical mimesis, which, as Derrida points out, is “the most naive form of representation.”9 Nevertheless, it is precisely this most naive form of representation that would seem to be the most desirable of sexual performances. Bersani’s objections to the frequent theorization of such things as “the gay-macho style, the butch-fem lesbian couple, and gay and lesbian sado-masochism” as . . . “subversive parodies of the very formations and behaviours they appear to ape,” rather than, “unqualified and uncontrollable complicities with, correlatively, “a brutal and misogynous ideal of masculinity” [gay macho], . . . “the heterosexual couple permanently locked into a power structure of male sexual and social mastery over female sexual and social passivity” [butch-fem], or “fascism” [s/m], are clearly based on his contention that these sexual practices are not performative. Parody, Bersani states emphatically, “is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know this.”10 Although Bersani audaciously speaks for all gay men, I would have to agree with him and add that many lesbians know this too. Self-conscious mimicry of heterosexuality is a side show; when the main act comes to town, we all want the “real thing,” or, more precisely, we all want the Real thing. That is, sexuality is always, I think, about our desire for the impossible-real, not the real of the illusion that passes for reality, but the Real that eludes symbolization.
Lesbian s/m erotica has become increasingly assertive about claiming dildoes as the “real thing.” Although strap- ons are advertised as “toys,” inside the narratives and testimonials of lesbian s/m practitioners references to an outside or a “model” are most often discarded in favor of descriptions that simply occupy the status of the real. So, for example, it has become common to speak of “watching her play with her dick,” or “sucking her off,” or “your dick find[ing] its way inside of me.”11 As one contributor to Quim puts it: “When I put on a strap on I feel male. I feel my dick as real otherwise I can’t use it well.”12 Rarely if ever does one find lesbian erotica that refers to the dildo as a joke, an imitation, or a substitute, whether these narratives are explicitly in an s/m context or in the more prevalent accounts of butch/femme vanilla erotica. On the contrary, the erotic charge of these narratives depends on both tops and bottoms, butches and femmes exhibiting nothing less than respect for the “phallic” instrument.
Bersani’s argument about gay macho depends on this notion of respect for masculinity as a model. But the slide from gay macho to lesbian butch-fem and s/m is too facilely made. Whereas gay macho’s “mad identifications” are between gay and straight men, which he argues is a “direct line (not so heavily mediated) from excitement to sexuality,”13 the identifications made by b/f and s/m lesbians follow a more circuitous route in which the condensations and displacements are more complex. Most obviously, gay macho’s relationship to straight masculinity remains a homo-sexual affair; whereas lesbian b/f and s/m, as long as we are caught within the logic of this binary, would be hetero- sexual. In both cases, however, the erotic charge can only be articulated within the terms of a symbolic order that depends for its coherency on maintaining the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Nonetheless, even within the terms of this symbolic order, which I presume is what Bersani refers to when he speaks of sex “as we know it,” there is already dissidence, rather than resemblence, in the image of a woman penetrating another woman with a dildo. Although both might be interpreted as a yearning toward “masculinity,” in the gay man’s case it is a masculinity that the dominant culture at least marginally assigns to him and that he thus might willingly surrender. In the lesbian top’s case, it is a “masculinity” that she aggressively appropriates without any prior cultural ownership only then to give it up. If we look at it from the bottom’s perspective, there is quite a difference between the gay man who cannot “refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman,” and the lesbian who is presumed by the dominant sexual order already to be a woman.
Over a decade ago, Monique Wittig implicitly enjoined us to write The Symbolic Order with a slash through the article, just as Lacan writes The Woman, when she made her then startling announcment that “Lesbians are not women.”14 The straight mind, she pointed out, “speaks of the difference between the sexes, the symbolic order, the Unconsious . . . giving an absolute meaning to these concepts when they are only categories founded upon heterosexuality . . . .”15 Returning to this article, it is interesting to remember that the example Wittig chooses to demonstrate the material oppression effected through discourses is pornography. Pornography, she argues, signifies simply that “women are dominated.”16 Thus Wittig might be aligned with Mackinnon when she argues that pornography “institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, fusing the eroticization of dominance and submission with the social construction of male and female.”17 It is this position that Bersani perversely asks us to reconsider when he temporarilly allies himself with Mackinnon and Dworkin only in order to argue for the necessity of proliferating pornography rather than banning it. However, if the ultimate logic of the radical feminist argument for the realism of porn is “the criminalization of sex itself until it has been reinvented,”18 whether one takes up a position for or against pornography on this basis, are we not then already acceding to the “straight mind” that can only think homosexuality as “nothing but heterosexuality”?19
What has fallen out of these discussions is heterosexuality as a social contract, one that as Wittig argues can not only be but already is broken by practicing lesbians. For when we hear of “sex as we know it” or the ultimate logic of anti-porn feminists as the “criminalization of sex,” this “sex” is always already heterosexuality, and implicitly, a relationship of identity between the phallus and the penis. Lacan seems to free us from this difficulty when he argues that the Phallus is a signifier (without a signified), not a body part, nor a partial object, nor an imaginary construct.20 However, in her recent reading of Lacan’s “The Meaning of the Phallus,” back through “The Mirror Stage,” Judith Butler shows that Lacan’s denial of the Phallus as an imaginary effect is “constitutive of the Phallus as a privileged signifier.”21 At the risk of reductively summarizing her nuanced argument, what Butler’s essay seems to conclude is that the Symbolic is always only a masculine imaginary that produces the Phallus as its privileged signifier by denying the mechanisms of its own production.
Lacan’s move to locate the Phallus within the Symbolic presumably breaks its relation of identity with the penis since symbolization “depletes that which is symbolized of its ontological connection with the symbol itself.”22 Just as Magritte’s painting of a pipe is not a/the pipe, so the penis and phallus are not equivalent.23 But, as Butler points out, they do retain a priveleged relationship to one another through “determinate negation.”24 If symbolization is what effects ontological disconnection, we might ask what happens to those “pipes” that are excessive to representation. Would not those things that cannot take place within any given symbolic end up accorded a radically negative ontological status? Would they not, in other words, become that which is real, and therefore impossible?25
When Wittig argues that rejecting heterosexuality and its institutions is, from the straight mind’s perspective, “simply an impossibility” since to do so would mean rejecting the “symbolic order” and therefore the constitution of meaning “without which no one can maintain an internal coherence,”26 she seems to suggest that the straight mind simply denies the possibility of lesbianism. But phallocentrism/heterosexism does not merely secure its dominance through a simple negation. Rather, it needs lesbianism as a negative ontology. It needs its status as both radically real and impossible.
That this is the case can be seen in Silverman’s reconceptualization of the borders of male subjectivity in which her analysis at once ignores lesbian sexuality and persistently depends on it as yet another instance of a constitutive outside. Determined to undo the tenacious assumption that there are only two possible sexual subject positions, Silverman ends by positing three possible “same- sex” combinations: 1. two morphological men 2. a gay man and a lesbian [both occupying psychically masculine positions] 3. a lesbian and a gay man [both occupying psychically feminine positions].27 Given Silverman’s sophisticated psychoanalytic rendering of the body’s imaginary production, it might sound naive to suggest that the latter two positions are morphologically heterosexual, i.e., one of each. Yet she retains the category of two morphological men, so there is obviously still some recourse to a materiality of the body outside its imaginary formations.
Silverman concludes her book by asserting that her third paradigm for male homosexuality has the “most resonance for feminism,” which she claims to represent politically.28 But what is striking is that this is the only place in her analysis where lesbianism is represented. For it is in this most politically productive model of male homosexuality that the “authorial subjectivity” can be accessed “only through lesbianism.”29 What could this “lesbianism” be if not two morphologically female bodies, which oddly do not appear in her liberating models for “same-sex” desire? The feminism that Silverman speaks for politically is once again a heterosexual feminism; for her ability to make cases for imaginary gay sexualities is only intelligible through the assumption of a lesbian sexuality that remains stable and constitutively outside her recombinations of the relationships between psychic identifications and imaginary morphologies. Thus she depends on the orthodoxy of the impossibility of lesbian desire in order to challenge and break with the other orthodoxies that limit sexual choices for (heterosexual) women.
The model that proposes the impossiblity of lesbian desire, constructed as two morphological females with psychic feminine identities, is impossible within psychoanalytic terms precisely because there is no desire without a phallic signifier. In order for lesbianism to escape from its stabilizing function as the place-holder of a lack, Butler’s fictive lesbian phallus would seem to be indispensable. Yet there is still in this formulation a submission to psychoanalytic orthodoxy; and lesbian sado- masochists have thought of much more interesting ways to practice dominance and submission.
Suppose we agree with Bersani’s argument that phallocentrism is “above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women,”30 and consider what value women might find in powerlessness. I would agree with Tania Modleski that from a heterosexual woman’s perspective there might not be much to value in powerlessness.31 But from a lesbian perspective things look different. Powerlessness, in Bersani’s argument, seems to mean little more than submitting to penetration. When he takes anatomical considerations into account, he refers to the “real” of bodies which are constructed in such a way that “it’s almost impossible not to associate mastery and subordination with intense pleasures.”32 If the value of powerlessness is equivalent to being penetrated, note that the “woman” in Bersani’s imaginary must be either a heterosexual female or a gay man. Not only does Bersani then retain an equivalency between the phallus and the penis, but he also reinforces a morphological conflation of the vagina and the anus. At the same time, he insists upon a fantasmatic gender distinction that depends on these anatomical parts as referents. Bersani’s argument, then, surely exceeds his intentions. For while he means to value the powerlessness of both men and women, it is paradoxically between these two penetrable orifices, which are at once the same and different, that on their front/to/back axis the illusion of an impermeable male body is sustained. As D.A. Miller puts it: “only between the woman and the homosexual together may the normal male subject imagine himself covered front and back.”33
If, as Butler argues, Lacan retains a relationship of identity between the phallus and the penis through “determinate negation,” it is also possible to understand the valorization of a masochism that is explicitly male as further consolidation of this relation of equivalence. For male masochism, which presumably relinquishes the phallus by occupying the being of woman, would necessarily assume that she is the one who does not “have it.” In other words, it is only by giving it up that one gets it. Hence the continuing postulation that female masochism is impossible depends on the assurance that she has nothing to give up. The female masochist would have to give up something that she does not have; and if she were represented as giving it up, then it would have to be admittted that the phallus is nothing more than an imaginary construct. According to Freud’s narrative, women are presumed to have once “had” the penis. The phallus/penis as “lost object” always refers us to the past of a woman’s body and the dreaded future of a man’s body. Hence the cultural horror associated with “becoming a woman.”
Lesbians who regard their strap-ons as the “real thing” instigate a representational crisis by producing an imaginary in which the fetishistic/hallucinatory “return” of the penis onto a woman’s body goes beyond the “transferable or plastic property”34 of the phallus to other body parts by depicting a phallus that has no reference to the “real” of the penis. The lesbian-dick is the phallus as floating signifier that has no ground on which to rest. It neither returns to the male body, originates from it, nor refers to it. Lesbian-dicks are the ultimate simulacra. They occupy the ontological status of the model, appropriate the privilege, and refuse to acknowledge an origin outside their own self-reflexivity. They make claims to the real without submitting to “truth.” If the phallus was banned from feminist orthodoxy because it was presumed to signify the persistence of a masculine or heterosexual identification, and butch lesbians or s/m tops who wore strap-ons were thus represented, as Butler points out, as “vain and/or pathetic effort[s] to mime the real thing,”35 this “real thing” was at least two real things, which were only each other’s opposites. There was not much difference between the straight “real thing,” and the lesbian “real thing,” since the latter was only the absence of the former. Both these prohibitions converged on the assumption of an identity between the phallus and the penis. Without that identification, the top who wears the strap-on is not the one who “has” the phallus; rather it is always already the bottom who “has it” by giving up what no one can have. In the lesbian imaginary, the phallus is not where it appears. That’s why so many butches, as most lesbians know, are bottoms.
Notes
1. Maria Marcus, A Taste for Pain: on Masochism and Female Sexuality, trans. Joan Tate (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 181.
2. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 39.
4. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 212.
5. Sigmund Freud, “The Economic Problem in Masochism,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1966) vol. 19, 162.
6. Kaja Silverman, “Masochism and Male Subjectivity” Camera Obscura, 17 (1988), 52.
7. Jan Brown, “Sex, lies, and penetration: A Butch finally ‘fesses up,” The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, ed. Joan Nestle (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1992), 412.
8. Susan Farr, “The Art of Discipline: Creating Erotic Dramas of Play and Power,” Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M (Boston: Alyson, 1981) 185.
9. Jacques Derrida, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 234.
11. Quim, Issue 3 (Winter 1991), 10 and 13. Similar language can be found in almost any issue of On Our Backs or Bad Attitude. And, in fact, in periodicals such as the now defunct Outrageous Women (which was published during the 80’s) one also finds such references to “lesbian dicks,” sometimes without the qualifier. What is apparent is that s/m dykes have always considered their dildoes to be the “real thing.”
12. Anonymous, Quim Issue 3 (Winter 1991), 36.
14. Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992) 32.
17. Catherine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 3 and 172.
19. Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 28.
20. Jacques Lacan, “The Meaning of the Phallus,” Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), 74-85.
21. Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” differences, “The Phallus Issue,” 4, no.1 (Spring 1992), 156.
23. Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
25. If the “realesbian” of lesbian-feminism was a socially impossible identity, so in the psychoanalytic symbolic are lesbians only possible in/as the “Real,” since they are foreclosed from the Symbolic order–they drop out of symbolization. If they can be signified at all it is only as an algebraic x. Given that the “Real” is, in part, the brute, inscrutable core of existence, the “Real” lesbian is in this sense coincident with the “realesbian.” Hence as both real/Real, these figures make her “identical with [her] existence–self-identical–raw, sudden, and unfettered,” but impossible to “see, speak or to hear, since in any case [she] is always already there.” See Catherine Clement’s illuminating discussion of the Lacanian “real-impossible” in The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 168-169.
26. Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 26.
27. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 381.
31. Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age (New York: Routledge, 1991), 145-158. I agree with Modleski that Bersani loses the sympathy of a feminist reader when he “declines to factor in the ‘history of male power'” (148). However, though she acknowledges that lesbian sadomasochists’ arguments must be taken seriously and points to the unresolvable contradiction between the acting out of power and the presumption of consensuality, I take exception to her assertion that the “defining feature of s/m [is] the infliction of pain and humiliation by one individual on another” (154). As her own discussion indicates, the s/m relationship resists that definition. I have taken up these questions at length elsewhere. What is important to point out here is that Modleski subtly posits the same distinction between “the feminist” reader and the “lesbian” that Silverman holds. The former is a heterosexually-gendered subject, the latter is something like an “exception” to the feminist “rule.” Thus, once again, the “lesbian” becomes that (constitutive) “outside” that facilitates “the feminist” argument.
32. Bersani, “Rectum,” p. 216.
33. D.A. Miller, “Anal Rope,” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 135.