Sexual Difference, Abjection and Liminal Spaces

A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Abhorrence of the Feminine

Bethany Morris

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429509193
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Psicologia
• Thema: Sessualità umana in psicologia

This book uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore the ways in which sexual difference can be understood as an encounter with otherness through the abjected, investigating social discourses and unconscious anxieties around "monstrous" women throughout history and how they may challenge these characterizations.

The author expands on Barbara Creed's notion of the monstrous-feminine to give a specifically Lacanian analysis of different types of feminine monsters, such as Mary Toft, Andrea Yates, Lillith, and Medusa. Drawing on Lacan's theory of "sexuation, " the book interrogates characterizations of pregnant women during the Enlightenment, women who commit filicide, mothers in the psychoanalytic clinic, and women with borderline personality disorder. Chapters explore how encounters with a feminine subject in the Lacanian sense can manifest in misogynistic practices aimed at women, as well as how a Deleuzian notion of becoming-other may pose a challenge to their interpretation in a phallocentric meaning-making system. Creatively engaging the work of both Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, the text goes beyond simply identifying misogynistic practices by probing the relational, unconscious dynamics between hegemonic groups and those designated as "other."

Approaching the concept of the borderline from a critical and transdisciplinary perspective, this text will appeal to postgraduate students and researchers from Lacanian psychoanalysis, gender studies, cultural studies, and critical psychology.

Chapter 1

Introduction

In 1955, Lacan (2006) made a proclamation that psychoanalysis and its practitioners needed to return to Freud, claiming that Freud’s antecedents were betraying the radical principles of the field. Lacan was witnessing the advent of ego psychology and the eclipsing of the unconscious by the ego as the site of experience. In doing so, Freud’s insights were at risk of being lost to a “science” of the reified ego. I do not say “science” out of derision, but rather to demarcate the tension between psychoanalysis and psychological sciences, as well to note the shift in psychoanalysis toward mainstream practices that it originally sought to critique. This book comes out of a similar concern. That is, a concern about the reification of the ego at the expense of the unconscious, both our own and others. The history of harmful and horrific practices against women has concerned me since learning about Sarah Baartman, “The Hottentot Venus,” in an undergraduate 18th century literature class, in which behaviors were justified because the person who was subjected to them was deemed less than human. The contemporary moment has its own horrors with the unrelenting #MeToo stories, the wave of attempts to overturn or counter Roe v. Wade in the United States, and attacks on women’s safety around the world.

My concern, and what I hope to bring to the discussion about our current climate of social issues, is an obfuscation of sexual difference in the discourse about the tension between the sexes. Sexual difference has been the site of a longstanding debate between American and French Feminism, and though both sides offer important tools for thinking about the status of women in the 21st century, the concerns of French feminism, as born out of psychoanalysis, offer sharp critiques of the American sect as well as provide nuanced ways to consider sexual difference as a site of potential for combating oppression. Sexual difference, especially in the Lacanian tradition, takes seriously the relationship with the Other, as in the one to which we attempt to account for in our own unconscious. In doing so, it retains the dichotomy of two sexes, but challenges the status quo binary system predicated on biological differences and allows for a consideration of anxiety in the face of difference. The reason this is important is because it runs contrary to as to those discourses that focus on hatred, power, and conscious intention on the part of the perpetrator of discrimination, prejudice, or violence. While compassion for such individuals may, upon first glance, seem unwarranted, the Lacanian tradition allows for a way of considering the ways in which we all confront anxiety in the face of difference. It is this anxiety, the anxiety of Man, the patriarchy, or the oppressor, that I want to consider, and emphasize by considering it as in response to the horror of sexual difference.

By horror, I mean that distinct, inconsolable affect that dances around an encounter without ever quite resting comfortably on an appropriate signifier. Horror tends to have negative connotations in contemporary Western society, with associations to blood and gore, supernatural creatures, and threats to one’s life. While these associations are dominant, my intention in using the word horror in relation to sexual difference is to consider the subjective state of inarticulable anxiety elicited in the confrontation with an other whose very presence undermines one’s own. This type of horror goes beyond maimed body parts and instead threatens one’s conceptualization of one’s humanity or subjectivity. By coming to terms with this idea, those beliefs, practices, and interventions aimed at regulating the behavior and practices of the other can be understood as an attempt to eradicate this horror. To state it another way, practices which attempt to efface manifestations of sexual difference are not simply acts of misogyny or examples of patriarchal oppression, but rather should be understood as a complicated nexus of anxiety, resistance, liberation, and disruption.

In order to guide my analysis of these encounters, I utilize a hybrid theoretical analysis, relying heavily on the works of and contributors to the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, as well as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Jacques Lacan offers a theory of the modern Western subject, as constituted by and through language, and began to articulate the problem of sexual difference as posited by Freud’s now-infamous question, “What do women want?” Specifically, it is Lacan’s consideration of the feminine subject and feminine jouissance as that which cannot be spoken about, and that which harkens to a time prior to an individualized subject that I identify as the foundation of sexual difference. More specifically, it is Julia Kristeva’s take on the abject and abjection as being intimately tied to sexual difference that I utilize to uncover the ways in which approaches to either explicate or efface the notion of sexual difference inevitably create a moral exclusion or outcast in the form of the monstrous-feminine.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari will guide my analysis of this monstrous-feminine in considering the ways in which these encounters could be understood as having latent potential in considering subjectivity and its deconstruction in the contemporary moment. Specifically, I argue that their concept “becoming-woman” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980), which they argue is the first stage of challenging the rigid conditions of the human being, relies on Lacan’s notion of Woman that is, the woman under erasure. It is not my intention to suggest that Deleuze and Guattari take up Lacanian analysis where Lacan was unable to go, as their projects diverged in such ways that such a statement would do none of these theorists justice. Rather, in this book, I speculate about how those encounters with instantiations of sexual difference can first be accounted for through a Lacanian understanding of sexuation and jouissance, and then demonstrate how they may have had an effect on the subject in such a way that his assumptions about the Other, and thus relations to, may have been altered. This is not to assume an understanding of the subjects in question, nor would this be akin to a psychoanalysis of their behavior. Rather, I would like to think about the subjects discussed as both constituted, and unable to be adequately constituted, by different dominant discourses, with the assumptions that these subjects exist in a map, as opposed to some sort of teleological progression of discourses.

Horror and sexual difference

The research on gender and horror, monsters or monstrosity is vast. Horror films in particular have received a great deal of consideration for both their perpetuation of sexist and violent attitudes toward women, as well as for their potential to challenge and subvert hegemonic gender discourses. Similarly, many works of fiction that have been identified as horror, gothic, or thriller have been investigated through the lenses of gender theory, as well as abjection. Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (1982) uses literature from Kafka, Artaud, and Dostoevsky, among others, as a means to discuss and exemplify her notion of the abject, which will be elaborated on shortly. Most of the scholarly literature on sexual difference and horror is in regard to gender roles and issues pertaining to violence and aggression toward women. For this reason, I will engage with literature that provides opportunities to discuss sexual difference beyond the level of symbolic distinctions, and grapples with those distinctions that pertain to epistemological differences within sexuation as mentioned previously. For these reasons, I will stick to a discussion of two specific texts here: Carol Clover’s Men, women and chain saws: Gender in the modern horror film and Barbara Creed’s The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism and psychoanalysis.

The final girl

Carol Clover’s (1992) book Men, women and chainsaws: Gender in the modern horror film is one of the seminal texts on gender and horror films. She focuses on American horror films from the 1970s and 1980s in which the issue of gender seems to be pertinent, specifically in slasher films, occult or possession films, and rape-revenge films. Clover’s work seems to respond to the question: Who watches horror films? as well as the assumption that the audience is male, with questions about identification, especially in those films that include a “final girl.” The final girl is the female protagonist in a horror film who, after the monster or murderer has slaughtered all or the majority of the characters, is left to confront and destroy the monster. Clover claims that horror movie audiences, who have been typically male, have been thought to identify with the monster or serial killer and in doing so are able to vicariously commit acts of violence against women that they would be punished for in real life. The male spectator then is one who has unconscious fantasies of murder or rape and sublimates it by watching depictions of such acts as entertainment. Such an explanation reinforces assumptions about men as inherently aggressive and the aggressor. This is similar to Laura Mulvey’s (1992) consideration of the sadistic-voyeuristic male gaze, in which she argues that such films are designed with a male gaze in mind. Specifically, she makes the case that voyeurism is inherently pleasurable, and that that pleasure lies in the gaze’s ability to ascertain guilt, assert control, and be the arbiter of punishment or forgiveness for the guilty person.

Clover’s point is not to contradict Mulvey’s conception of the male gaze, nor detract from its influence. Rather, she seeks to make an addendum, suggesting that identification is perhaps more equivocal than Mulvey posited. Clover follows Freud’s argument about the enduring power of certain stories, claiming that they allow for a safe engagement with repressed desires and fears, as well as a means for re-enactment. While this does not initially sound different from Mulvey’s argument, its implications stretch further. Clover suggests that the horror movie is structured in such a way that this assumed male audience likely also identifies with the final girl. She argues that the spectator is both the wolf and the young girl in Little Red Riding Hood, just as we are both attacker and victim in the horror film, because the horror derives from having an apprehension of both sides. Furthermore, the final girl collapses the victim and hero dichotomy, traditionally a female and male dichotomy, and she is at once both. The spectator similarly must struggle with impotence and virility in the hopes of vanquishing the monster, whether it be a man in a mask with a chainsaw or an amorphous consuming blob.

The monstrous-feminine

While Clover’s work is both creative and impressive, her work deals largely with gender identifications. In contrast, Barbara Creed (1999) explicitly takes on a psychoanalytic investigation about the role of castration in horror films, and thus attempting to account for the unconscious. She challenges traditional assumptions about feminine monsters, namely that, according to Freudian theory, the woman evokes terror or horror because she is assumed to be castrated. This horror is akin to the horror that the male child experiences during his Oedipal development, in which he realizes that women, as exemplified by his mother, are lacking the phallus, and that it must have been taken from her. Thus, he develops castration anxiety, which motivates his sublimation into a number of behaviors, not to mention psychosexual theories. Stephen Neale (1980) in his book Genre argues that the male monster in horror films functions to fill the lack, that is, to disavow their castration, defending against the all-consuming anxiety that it provokes. He argues further, that, most monsters are male because they take woman as the object of their desire, not with a heteronormative assumption but rather in relation to lack and the phallus. In contrast, Susan Lurie (1981) argues that man fears woman not because she is castrated, but rather because she is not castrated and marked in the way that he would be if were to be castrated. Rather than being horrified at her lack, man instead fears that she will castrate him.

Barbara Creed, while appreciating Lurie’s contradiction to Neale’s argument, is not satisfied with her approach as it assumes, like Neale, that the monster is inherently male. Creed, on the other hand, is interested in those monsters which are feminine. She argues that there are monsters in horror films which are distinctly feminine, and not simply female monsters in the male role. Rather, she seeks to ascertain precisely what monstrous-femininity entails and, relying on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theories, why it is so frightening. Following Williams (1984) piece explicating the similarities between monsters and women, suggesting that the woman spectator has an affinity with the monster as the site of threatening sexuality, Creed seeks to delve deeper into this affinity. She makes an argument that the monstrous-feminine is usually expressed in relation to her reproductive and mothering capacities, which she identifies as the monstrous womb, the witch, the vampire, and the possessed woman. To defend her assertion, she uses Kristeva’s (1982) work on abjection, which I will elaborate on later, and the conflicting desires elicited by the maternal body.

Similar to Clover, however, Creed also remains within film in order to discuss the monstrous-feminine. Janisse (2012) goes one step further in her autobiographical cartography of women in horror film, in which she weaves personal narrative through her House of psychotic women. Her book is one of the largest compilations of representations of the monstrous-feminine in horror films and she illuminates these films with vivid descriptions and intense analysis. However, similar to Clover and Creed, that analysis remains strictly within the realm of film analysis. This is not a critique, but rather a consideration as to where I would like to situate this book: a convergence of the humanities, the social sciences, psychoanalytic, and feminist theory grounded in sociocultural research. Similar to research using Lacan and Kristeva, the monstrous-feminine, or sexual difference for that matter, has been an endeavor largely investigated by scholars within the humanities, leaving those in the human sciences to consider those matters that they can evaluate empirically. This book attempts to bring some of these considerations developed within the disciplines of Literature, Philosophy, and Film Studies to a consideration of the human subject within a number of contexts, with a conviction that the human subject cannot be compartmentalized by disciplines, and that psychoanalysis offers a rich collection of theories and methodologies through which to think the sociohistorical subject and the question of sexual difference.

Why film?

In a number of the chapters, I weave examples and explanations pertaining to films alongside considerations of archival material. Though I garner much pleasure and many insights from films, I do not pretend to be a film theorist. Many of the observations made about the films in this book may be quite obvious to a dedicated film theorist or connoisseur, or completely inaccurate in some circles. However, it is my intention to understand films as an arena of discourses that become culturally embedded in contemporary society. The result is that films and the various modes of knowledge production about subjectivity intimately become intertwined. Furthermore, though film is often used within the humanities as a legitimate sight of investigation about culture and subjectivity, they have largely been ignored in the social sciences, typically because of the assumption that they are open to interpretation and fail to offer empirical observations. For this book, film then becomes an important hinge through which to communicate the rich theoretical insights produced by psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the humanities with the social sciences, such as psychology and sociology, who claim to take culture and subjectivity as their sights of inquiry. Art and literature has been at the forefront of investigations into the psyche long before the arrival of psychology and sociology, and I believe the social sciences could benefit from a renaissance.

In using film as a means through which to discuss sexual difference and anxiety, it became clear that horror would be my genre of choice. Though I could have just as easily sampled from a number of genres, horror has a complicated home within the discourse of sexual difference. As I will further elaborate on, scholars in psychoanalytic theory and feminist theory have used horror as the vehicle of investigation, such as Laura Mulvey, Carol Glover, and Barbara Creed. Horror also speaks to certain existential anxieties that cannot adequately be symbolized, such as sexual difference, and is elicited in a number of ways that require the suspension of symbolic laws and norms, and demand an encounter the inarticulable. While other genres may attempt to produce a similar encounter, such as fantasy or science fiction, a good horror demonstrates the potential subjective destitution that an encounter with difference can elicit and thus deromanticizes alterity to demonstrate that difference without resolution is intensely distressing. Horror, then, provides a rich tapestry to explore anxiety without an object.

This book will utilize Jacques Lacan’s notion of sexuation and sexual difference as a means to elucidate some of these encounters. Chapter 2, “Sexuation and becoming-woman,” includes an introductory primer to Lacanian psychoanalysis and Lacan’s theory of sexuation, which rests on his claim that there is no sexual relation, meaning that the differences between the sexes cannot be reconciled because they are grounded in different epistemological assumptions. It is then my intention not to contrast, but braid together Lacan’s contemporaries’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, theory of becoming-woman, which emphasizes a consideration of subjectivity as an encounter that is implicitly political. Through an understanding of Lacan’s notions of the “Woman” and sexual difference, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy can be explored further for its implications.

Following this primer chapter, I then make the case that patriarchal societies are organized around a masculine epistemological framework, premised in the prevalence and primacy of the phallus and phallic signifiers; I propose that a confrontation wi...