Lacan and Critical Feminism

Subjectivity, Sexuation, and Discourse

Rahna McKey Carusi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367197025
• eBook ISBN: 9780429515903
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book takes a critical feminist approach to Lacan's fundamental concepts, merging discourse and sexuation theories in a novel way for both psychoanalysis and feminism, and exploring the possibility of a feminist subject within a non-masculine logic.

In Lacan and Critical Feminism, Carusi merges Lacan's theories of discourse and sexuation, not only from a gender/sexuality angle, but also from a literary, feminist, and women's studies framework. By drawing examples from literature, film, art, and socio-political movements to focus on discourse and sexuation, the text examines how tropes impact the subject's positionality within any discourse mode. The book also uses women's collective experience and action to illustrate ways that women have repositioned dominant narratives discursively.

This text represents essential reading for researchers interested in the relationship between Lacan and feminist theory.

1Introduction

Why not make a book title out of it? […] “beyond the phallus.” That would be cute, huh? And it would give another consistency to the women’s liberation movement. A jouissance beyond the phallus…

Lacan (being a dick), SXX, 74

On May 21, 2011, the internet Star article “Footloose and Gender-Free” covered a family who refused to reveal the sex of their baby, Storm, and the story went viral.¹ These parents are not the first to attempt to remove their child’s “biological sex” from their social interactions: in June 2009, an article reported that a Swedish couple had not yet revealed the sex of their child, Pop, who was two and a half at the time.² Both sets of parents explained that they chose to withhold the sex of their child not only to offer “it” some agency in choosing and/or navigating its gender identification(s), but also to disrupt socio-cultural gender norms. Few people should find it surprising that in the second decade of the new millennium, in the wake of at least half a century of gender-based activism and scholarship, a trend to reconsider gender formation would arise. Of course, staunch traditionalists and neophobes struggle with change, and they tend to dominate mainstream platforms, most likely because their rhetoric provokes media drama. Ten years after the 2009 article, as we know, the gender conversation has evolved to one of mainstream visibility and rights activism where gender variant, non-binary, and trans folks are gaining more and more recognition and rights. The earlier (and still sometimes the later) media focus on dissenters to the reconsideration of gender formation, however, keeps mainstream media not only from asking critical questions about gender formation and representation, but also affects the masses who the media arguably tends to influence in terms of what holds present significance.

For example, the main complaint lodged by Storm’s grandparents in 2011 is that they “resented explaining the gender-free baby to friends and co-workers” and that they have to use too many words to compensate for ambiguous pronouns or learn not to use pronouns at all and refer to the child as “the baby” or Storm all the time. They find this use of language difficult and think it sounds repetitive. It is significant that the grandparents’ complaint is not that they do not know the sex of the child, but that it is difficult for them to speak about the child, to put “it” into words. Just like so many responders to the article who argue that the parents are forcing their ideological and political opinions on the child without realizing that all parents, even “normal” or “hegemonious” ones, are also always forcing ideology onto their children, the grandparents do not realize that the insistence on a gendered pronoun is also repetitive, in terms both of sound and the figuration of the child’s subjectivity. Not only does the repetition of the articulation of gender manifest in the supposed one-to-one connection between a name and the body that it designates, but it also imposes discursive gender scripts on the subject through persistence and insistence. Gender(ed) pronouns are more than a mere signifying tool in our linguistic structure; they do much more than merely designate a person in the absence of their name. As queer theorists and activists have argued, gender(ed) pronouns are loaded with ideological and political implications marked on the psyche and the soma of the subject.

To be clear, this book is not a book about gender variance. Rather, this project explores the ways that discourse works upon the psyche and soma of the subject and, therefore, on social relations. I specifically want to explore the ways that discourse both shapes subjectivity and subjectivization (e.g., the discursive underpinnings at work in Storm’s grandparents’ complaints) and the ways that discourse can change and re-shape or even shape anew those identifications and social relations (e.g., the self-declaration of pronouns and use of they/their currently), particularly in regards to sexuation and gender formations. In a way, this exploration is aspirational in that it seeks to consider different ways of meaning as subjects, relating between subjects and within the subject, and breaking free from patriarchal and misogynistic constraints of understanding. My feminist scholar self and my psychoanalytic scholar self have never (or maybe on a rare occasion) been at odds with each other, though feminisms and psychoanalysis are rarely in conversation elsewhere. I find Lacan’s work, particularly his mathematical logic, quite helpful in teasing out ways of understanding and thinking about multiple possibilities of socio-humanistic topics. So this project does just that: it explores various Lacanian mathemes and formulae to look closely at what is already happening, what occurrences are on the rise, and consider ways that we might create new possibilities, specifically in the narratives we rely upon and use to substantiate and manipulate in order to change our subjectivities and social relations.

Discourse, understood in Lacanian terms, designates the transsubjectivity of language as social link, as the social bond that occurs between subjects, as well as the transindividual occurrence at the level of the unconscious (My Teaching 79–86; SXI 207; SXVII 13, 100; SXX 21–22, 54). Discourse is transsubjective as it occurs between subjects, as well as transindividual as it occurs between and within parts of the individual as divided subject. Toward the end of his seminar career, Lacan says exasperatedly, “I can say until I’m blue in the face that the notion of discourse should be taken as the social link (lien social), founded on language, and thus seems not unrelated to what is specified in linguistics as grammar, and yet nothing seems to change” (SXX 17). Recalling Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols aphorism on the I and Being, “I am afraid we have not got rid of God because we still believe in grammar” (170), Lacan is focusing on the interrelatedness of discourse, the social link, language, and the subject. Lacan is theorizing that the grammar of the subject is a physical (rather than metaphysical) effect and the social link is a physical operation of discourse.

Lacan is discussing changes in discourse, the various possibilities of traversals – how they happen to us and how we can make them happen. I use the gender(ed) pronoun as an example because it discursively places, or situates, a subject for other subjects in terms of identity, which, for the purposes of this project and the field of theory in which I situate it, is a lie. The gendered pronoun signifies for others a figural and figurative identification – figural in the mathematical sense that designates a shape that consists of factors, as well as figurative in the sense of metaphor in speech that also connotes or engenders a visual representation – that subjects can then situate and interpret according to familiar significations. Lacan’s insistence is that discourse is a “link,” a metonymic structure of contiguous speech acts and meaning-making. Yet, gender(ed) pronouns function metaphorically; they stand in for a seemingly sedimented or “consistent” representation of similarity between two terms and of the difference that separates the two analogies – male is to masculine and female is to feminine – and most people try to perform within already socially scripted representations of them. But what happens when social and material conditions fail to provide sufficient support for these metaphors? Also, what happens when a subject, such as Storm or Pop, discursively forces the same social and material conditions to fail?

Much scholarship addresses the problematic in the metaphorical one-to-one (or word for word) relationship of sex and gender on subjectivity and subjectivization. This project contributes to this body of scholarship by revisiting Lacan’s work on the connection between discourse and sexuation and considering the possibilities of traversing the figural representations with which identifications are formed, specifically in terms of sexual difference and sexuation, rather than through the more common focus on the identity politics of gender. As I will discuss in more detail later, sexual difference is a fundamental split that occurs both in subject formation and within the Symbolic as we know it, whereas sexuation is the logic of how that difference and split become articulated in language and on the body. Sexual difference and sexuation are both processes and failures of identification within the social field; gender, then, is the figural hegemony for an (always, sexed) “identity” demanded of all subjects within our cultural Imaginary.

Revisiting Lacan’s treatment of metaphor and metonymy, I argue counter to much scholarship that focuses on what they read as Lacan’s privileging of metaphor, not only that he does not privilege metaphor, but also that metonymy is more critically productive as the privileged trope. I make the argument for a privileging of metonymy in order to look more closely at Lacan’s theories of discourse and sexuation, and the links which allow these two theories to be brought together. I use Lacan’s method of turning, or “looking awry,” at the master’s discourse to read the sexuation graph in order to theorize possibilities of social change from the “feminine” side of the graph. I read Lacan’s claim that “Woman does not exist, Woman (La),” (SXX 72, 78, 80–81) the term that appears in the bottom portion of the “feminine” side of the sexuation graph, metonymically in order finally to consider possibilities of a non-phallic consciousness available to anyone regardless of their sex and gender, which I argue is one way to pry discourse, and thereby subjectivization, loose from metaphorical gender structures as we know them. This project tries to contribute to contemporary feminisms, queer theory, and, tangentially, post-humanism and trans studies, all theories that are reconceptualizing not only subjectivity, but also the interfacings of the concepts of subject, object, and human by rethinking the figural as empty and, therefore simultaneously, full of potential within the social field.

Since the early 1980s, Foucault’s work has dominated much of the academic trends in critical and literary theory, particularly for scholars concerned with social and political discourses. Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists argues cogently, however, that Foucault’s binary breakdown of discourse into conflicts of difference that produce and effect knowledge and power limits, rather than enables our comprehension of social possibility (18). For example, a Foucauldian perspective may make use of the argument about the gender-less child as a power struggle over identity politics and access to mobility, but both the argument and the power struggle function at the level of panoptic perpetuation. Copjec clarifies that the difference between Foucault’s and Lacan’s theorization of the connection between desire and the social is fundamental to the limitations and openings of these theories respectively: “Foucault conceives desire not only as an effect, but also […] as a realization of the law,” whereas psychoanalysis argues that “it is the repression of this desire that founds society” (24, emphasis in original).³ Tim Dean explains that this is a matter of Foucault’s focus on positive terms – “forcing sex to speak” – brought on by a “critique of a naïve conception of repression,” which he contrasts with Lacan’s use of negation for his psychoanalytic understandings of repression, desire, and the unconscious (“Lacan and Queer Theory” 242). According to psychoanalysis, a primary repression must occur in order for desire to become; and the repression of drives, also known as the interplay between the reality and pleasure principles, propels desires that must occur for the establishment and continuation of social structures.⁴

Yet, many scholars, and many feminist and women’s studies scholars, remain effusively resistant to Lacan’s work. Most Foucauldian-based scholarship exists because his ideas privilege power; because they are useful for analyses concerned with subject marginalization, e.g., political issues of race, gender, and sexual practices. He is useful in these and other areas. There is a now decades-long dominant feminist backlash against Lacan because some of these scholars continue to claim that his work is misogynistic and patriarchal. In the introduction to Sexuation, Renata Salecl points out that postmodernist and deconstructionist thinking views sexual identity as “the result of complex discursive practices and of the interplay between power relations: what has been constructed in concrete historical constellations can also be deconstructed and radically changed” (1). Admittedly, I see this perspective as valid and real, but only up to a point. I do not dismiss the complexity of discursive practices and the interplay between power relations in the argument that follows, but rather I situate it in an interplay with the psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference, which is “first and above all the name for a certain fundamental deadlock inherent in the symbolic order” (2, emphasis in original). In order to think within the lenses of both feminisms and psychoanalysis, both issues of sexual identity or performance and of sexual difference need grappling with, a look at both the social link and at the subject.

Lacanian scholars, and particularly feminist Lacanian scholars, often have to explain and justify their methodology as if they are anti-Foucauldian, which often is not the case. Molly Anne Rothenberg, in her 2010 The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change, for example, reiterates Lacan’s significance as she carefully, chapter by chapter, explicates the shortcomings and limitations of critical theory by Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Judith Butler, and Ernesto Laclau, four highly influential theorists (whom I respect), all of whom rely on Foucauldian theory and/or selective readings of Lacanian theory. Genevieve Morel’s 2000-11 Sexual Ambiguities also provides a detailed argument that focuses on sexual difference and sexuation in order to steer away from the misguided emphasis of gender theory (xiv). In this way, the impetus of Morel’s work is similar to this project; however, she focuses specifically on psychosis and transsexuality as her objects of analysis. Elizabeth Wright’s Lacan and Postfeminism claims that postfeminism “has begun to consider the question of what the postmodern notion of the dispersed unstable subject might bring” (5), notes that the French feminists Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva never aligned themselves with the Anglophone feminisms (8), and that the descriptive – rather than prescriptive – approach to sexual difference in psychoanalysis has allowed for the possibility to “discuss a revolutionary interpretation” of the sexuation formulae within feminist discourses (13). I will argue here for a turn to Lacan through a feminist lens, particularly in regard to the way in which psychoanalysis can contribute to theories of discourse in order to continue rethinking subjectivity and subjectivization founded on the logic of sexuation. In other words, I think theories of psychoanalysis can provoke social change.

Lacan defines discourse simply as a transsubjective “social bond, founded in language” (44). The turn to Lacan, then, does not suggest, for example, that Foucault’s discourse theory is not useful; again, Foucault’s discourse theory connects directly and overtly to power relations, which are a real and valid consideration of socio-political issues, and, therefore, his work is compatible with this project and lurks in the background at times. One of Foucault’s definitions of discourse explains that it is an “asset that consequently, from the moment of its existence (and not only in its ‘practical applications’), poses the question of power; an asset that is, by nature, the object of a struggle, a political struggle” (Archaeology 120). A danger of relying exclusively on Foucault’s power-infused conceptualization of discourse, however, is that further theorizations and arguments are often stifled by the sole focus on identity politics. Tim Dean also makes this point by situating it historically in the 1960s and 1970s movements for civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, when gay and lesbian rights benefited greatly from identity politics. But the criticism of identity politics’ use value quickly arose in the 1980s and 1990s when AIDS spread and marginalized groups, specifically gay men, found that identity politics was easily turned on its head (“Lacan and Queer Theory” 239). In contrast to Foucauldian scholarship’s consistent focus on power relations, Lacan’s discourse theory centers on the function of language in the social link within which repression and desire are fundamental. Repression and desire can fit into the category of power dynamics, too, but they do so differently. Phallic desire, for example, may be about manifest power dynamics between subjects, but it is not the only kind of desire possible. I argue that we will find it productive to look more closely at structures of language as informed by desire; that is, at discourses in the Lacanian sense of the term.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, we are desiring subjects fundamentally, because we are subjects in and of language. The Symbolic, Lacan’s psychic register of language and its acquisition, is the place where desire manifests through signifying systems within the social field.⁵ Looking at the structures of language allows a closer examination of specific desires that inform traditional, perpetual narratives, and this examination of desires can provide insight into societal repressions. Insights into societal repressions that provoke hegemonic desires can incite a criticality that leads to social change in that the dynamic between subjectivity and subjectivization becomes evident as contingent rather than engineered or calculable. Through looking at how tropes function within our social myths to depoliticize discursive posi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A (re)turn to Lacan
• Quilting point A literary discussion on metaphor and metonymy
• Quilting point I AM A MAN and the essence of Woman
• Quilting point The masculine symptom in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
• Quilting point Tapping into excess, or the feminist trilogies
• Works cited
• Index