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starfrostingSo, you
appropriate my fist!--lesbian transformation of the phallus
“Why should our bodies end at our skin?”
-Donna Haraway1
“She said, ‘no, it’s dick I’m after, darlin’
and she headed for the door.
I said, ‘if it’s dick you’re after, darlin,
try my top dresser drawer.’”
-Alix Olson2
In patriarchal myth, the Gorgon is a big scary dyke. “The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone,” Freud relates conspiratorially in his 1922 essay.3 He goes on to declare that a multiplicity of what he called “penis symbols” signify castration; perhaps it would be more accurate to suggest that they evoke terror because they indicate female appropriation of the phallus. This would allow for a reading of Medusa as quite a lesbian menace! She has, horror of horrors, a plethora of nonpenile phallic symbols against which the frightened male spectator can only assert his singular omnipotent erection. But what if the phallus is not inherently singular and steady? Do plasticity and transferability suggest a monstrous threat to heterosexist, hegemonic sexuality?
As evidenced by the nightmarish figure of the Gorgon, radically-appropriated proliferations of phallic images do strike fear into the hearts of those who have a lot at stake in maintaining their dominion in the domain of sexuality. Where there’s fear there’s power, the saying goes, so what are the potentials for transformative relocation of the phallus? It is significant, in considering this challenge, to note that the Gorgon’s petrifying power arises in part as a result of both her emasculating rejection and usurpation of the phallus. Therefore, appropriation of the phallus entails a rejection of the penis as the sole, supreme, singular embodiment of phallic powers which are assumed to be the natural property of men. This destabilizes the unspoken assumption that the penis is the “real,” primary phallus which generates normative patterns of heterosexuality around castration anxiety. Uprooting the notion of some so-called “real” phallus actually generates a meaningful erotogenicity whereby “the very vacillation between between real and imagined body parts”4 allows for a kaleidoscoping of sexual possibilities.
Phallogocentrism is the holographic backbone of patriarchal law, language, and sexuality. Taken together, the assembled components of phallic power and symbolism create a shimmering, monolithic hologram just as they individually contain and reproduce the illusory fixed meaning and positionality of that bastion of patriarchy: the phallus. The primacy of the phallus as the singular, privileged signifier serves to consolidate the meaning of that which is signified-- but what, precisely, is being marked by the phallus? And why is so much energy invested in securing the phallus within a rigid heterosexual narrative where deviance equals degeneration?
Since the phallus is not, according to Lacan, a phantasy, object, or organ5, it figures in a more subtle and insidious way as a marker of binary power relations. To “be” the phallus is to wield the threat of castration, to be in the position of granting or withholding erotic fulfillment, and yet have no subjectivity. To “have” the phallus, then, is to be the ultimate, possessing subject, to have one’s sexuality signified by this great power and yet always fear its loss. Clearly, this dynamic of being and having is situated in an extremely dualistic, hetero-sexual economy where male masculinity is formed by the subject’s claim to the phallus. When the boychild has his méconnaisance, this erroneous image of omnipotence is predicated on a synecdochical privilege. The boy has the phallus because he has the penis; this soft little organ stands in for the whole slew of phallic powers granted him as part and parcel of his natural, innate “right” to masculinity.
In his essay on the mirror stage, Lacan makes penile méconnaisance the process by which all structures of the ego are formed (Lacan 6). By conflating the penis with the phallus, this narrative of self-recognition gives ideal-I subjectivity and language only to those male-assigned people with testicles and a penis dangling between their legs. It is incredibly damaging that the penis is installed as the ultimate phallus and then christened the identifier of that-which-can-claim being. Obviously the issue of subjectivity within the hierarchical dualism of being/having is not incidental to the notion of lesbian appropriation of the phallus; the relocation of the phallus outside “the father and his law” offers alternatives to the penetration of this his-story into people’s bodies and psyches.
To understand how patriarchal phallogocentrism locates the penis in a metonymic relationship to the phallus, one has to examine how and why the phallus is the privileged signifier, the origin of a chain of significations. Despite his previous vocal protestations to the contrary, Lacan explains the generative function of the phallus by equating it to the penis. Of the phallus, he writes, “It can be said that this signifier is chosen because it is the most tangible element in the real of sexual copulation” (Lacan 287). Making the penis the privileged signifier is an anxious response to the metonymic string of significations marked by the phallus. “The phallus is installed as an ‘origin’,” posits Butler, “precisely to suppress the ambivalence produced in the course of that slide.” When the penis and the phallus are conflated, she continues, the phallus acts “as the (symbolic) ideal that offers an impossible and originary measure for the genitals to approximate, and as the (imaginary) anatomy which is marked by the failure to accomplish that return to the symbolic ideal” (Butler 61). The insistence on the penis as the original site of signification can now be seen as a grasping attempt to fix meaning to an exclusive body part-- but what possibilities are opened up by ripping into the ambiguities so desperately self-concealed and naturalized by this anxiously-avowed stasis?
Perhaps some radical potential lies in turning the tools of phallogocentrism against itself, in insisting on ironic and inverting readings that reveal the cracks in supposedly-omnipotent logic. Erotogenicity- the oscillation in awareness between real and imagined body parts- plays a key part in certain psychoanalytic stories of ego formation. While méconnaisance builds an inflated sense of self through the (invariably male) subject’s externalized ideas of his body’s boundaries and capabilities, erotogenicity is the process by which bodily sensation is conveyed via the idea of body parts’ abilities to sense and send sexual stimulation. In phallogocentric logic, the penis gains its primacy through a string of significations and substitutions where the male genitals are situated as “an originary site of erotogenization which then subsequently becomes the occasion for a set of substitutions or displacements” (Butler 60).
However, this origin-myth has a major faultline. Erotogenicity is, after all, generated through the transmission of bodily awareness through an idea. “As a result,” Butler explains, ”it would not be possible to speak about a body part that precedes and gives rise to an idea, for it is the idea that emerges simultaneously with the phenomenologically accessible body” (Butler 59). Suddenly, erotogenicity reveals its great subversive potential! It no longer appears utterly rational to appoint the penis the origin of significance because, in the transmission of pleasure through “real” and imagined body parts, body parts don’t give rise to erotic meaning. Instead, an appropriative reading of erotogenicity invalidates the arrogantly stable location within the heterosexual matrix granted to the penis/phallus as privileged signifier.
Upsetting the complacent, fiercely-straight masculinity to which dichotomies of being and having are bound creates some intriguing possibilities for subversive pleasure. Since the process of erotogenicity actually ends up annihilating Lacan’s notion of penis-as-privileged-phallus, it means that the phallus can be resignified because it is indeed transferable. To put it another way, to insist on the shifting meanings and transferability of the phallus is to refuse to “prefigure and valorize which body part will be the site of erotogenization” (Butler 62). When the penis is no longer the favored site of phallic meaning which is somehow more “real” than other body parts, a myriad of deliciously-deviant erotics can prism forth from the fissures of patriarchy’s symbolic order.
Before exploring the polymorphously-pleasurable possibilities of the lesbian phallus, however, it is necessary to deal with the possible criticism levelled against it. Speaking on what Teresa de Lauretis would later name “sexual indifference,” Luce Irigaray declares that within the phallogocentric economy of the sex which is one, “there will be no female homosexuality, just a hommo-sexuality in which women will be involved in the same process of specularizing the phallus, begged to maintain the desire for the same that man has...”6 In this context, any notion of the lesbian phallus could be construed (and subsequently dismissed) as nothing more than false, masculinized consciousness. The lesbian phallus would then be seen as a capitulation to normative androcentric sexual goals. And why, the thinking goes, would lesbians enshrine what is a fundamental symbol of male domination in the first place?
So do queer bodies (and, more to the point, dyke sex) threaten hegemonic compulsory heterosexuality, rather than simply reinforce its phallogocentric power structure? First, carefully queer readings of psychoanalytic doctrine prove that the phallus must be dissociated from its erroneous equation to the penis; this is precisely what lesbian appropriation accomplishes. When dykes usurp the phallus from its virulently-defended position in a penile/phallic economy, we act in absolute opposition to the phallogocentrism which depends on male possession of the phallus and acquiescent female embodiment of the phallic power to grant men sexual satisfaction. This radical reimagining situates the phallus outside of biologically-deterministic heterosexuality and refuses to take straight sex (and congruently sexed-and-gendered bodies) as the natural, generative model of need, desire and pleasure.
Exclusivity is the central tenet of phallogocentric consolidation of power; the phallus is “supposed” to be the sole property of male-assigned men. Once the phallus is dislocated from the penis, it gives way to a liberatory proliferation of significations and situations. This is the second blow queer appropriation strikes to phallogocentrism, and it hits below the belt. Butch cock, a genderqueer dyke’s forearm, a transman’s penis, a femme’s silicone strap-on-- these are all examples of penetrative body parts imbued with significance and erotic power, meaning, and sensation. Needless to say, the penis is not granted a privileged position in this multiplicious litany of queer manifestations of phallic sexualities. The potential for radical reinscriptions of the phallus suggests that it is only when situated in a dominating context (which may be more specifically described as a rigidly heterosexist, gender-normative phallocracy that upholds the penis-phallus equation) that it becomes a tool of domination. Refusing to abandon the phallus to narratives which proclaim it the exclusive property of men is a potentially radical act.
What, then, are the juicy realities of lesbian proliferations of the phallus? First, one must think back to erotogenicity and the revelation that real and imagined body parts are pivotal in defining the body’s boundaries and sensations. When Judith Butler asks, “what is meant by the imaginary construction of body parts?” (Butler 59) she is urging a reimagining of consciousness and the body.
An explicit example of this erotic extension of consciousness is strap-on sex. For some dykes, strapping on a dildo is not related to gender play or trans identity; it is simply another way to enjoy partner sex. (For proof of this playfulness, witness the availability of smoothly-cylindrical toys formed of marbled pink silicone and spiked with glitter.) For others, strap-ons provide an opportunity to integrate their interpretation of their physical body with their gender expression. “The more familiar you are with both the reality and the fantasy of that organ,” writes Karlyn Lotney, “the more your strap-on will become a conduit for exchanging energy and sensuality between you and your partner-- and less an inert device. Strengthening the relationship between your sexual imagination and your tactile imagination,” she continues, ”can help you experience a stronger connection with your partner and greater physical pleasure from strap-on sex.”7 When they are moved out of the language of theory, it becomes even more clear that so-called “imaginary body parts” can be imbued with multiple erotic meanings. Strap-on rigs are also, of course, as close to a literal embodiment of the transferability of the phallus as one is likely to find.
Strap-ons are only one possibility in a multitude of manifestations of the lesbian phallus. A tongue, a forearm, a fist; a thigh, a hipbone, fingers---all can be considered symbolic of “having” the phallus, at the same time that their placement in a queer context suggests a collapsing of the very binary of being and having so essential to constructions of heterosexuality. Considering the vast array of subversively sexual phallic powers at dykes’ disposal, it is easy to imagine how proliferations of phallic symbols could be construed as castrating. Still, the lesbian phallus is only castrating if the phallus is conflated with the penis to the extent that its meaning is pinned to this organ as the sole site of meaning.
With this in mind, Freud’s assertion that the terrified male spectator gets hard as an apotropaic defense against the Gorgon seems silly. “To display the penis,” he insists, “is to say: ‘I am not afraid of you. I defy you. I have a penis” (Freud 213). The hero may have the penis, but this is not so helpful when the phallus is so clearly not rooted in this organ as origin. As evidenced by the complex signifying chain of metonymy and erotogenicity, the phallus-as-structure is constantly reiterated, reinscribed, and, therefore, re-created and open to beautiful morphological mutations.
When Freud maintains that the erect penis has apotropaic powers, he reveals an anxious awareness of the lesbian menace to hegemonic matrices of sexual power. “Here, then, is another way of intimidating the Evil Spirit,” he asserts. One cannot help but wonder: who or what is the evil spirit? Could it be that which does not have the penis and in fact rejects the penis as the sole source of power? If evil is indeed the annunciation of a new order,8 the lesbian phallus is a monstrous threat to the old (symbolic) order. Phallogocentrism is profoundly injured when the phallus is subjected to lesbian appropriation. This appropriation is subversive when it reveals the anatomical “fact” of sex, of clearly-delineated bodies and powers, as a phallacy.
In opposition to the unifying stasis sought by patriarchal phallogocentrism, the lesbian phallus exists in shifting borderlands and draws strength from apparent paradox. “When the phallus is lesbian, then it is and is not a masculinist figure of power; the signifier is significantly split, for it both recalls and displaces the masculinism by which it is impelled,” admits Butler. “And insofar as it operates as the site of anatomy,” she continues,” the phallus (re)produces the spectre of the penis only to enact its vanishing, to reiterate and exploit its perpetual vanishing as the very occasion of the phallus” (Butler 89). The lesbian phallus is a thorn in the side of the dominant cultural paradigm obsessed with maintaining the fixed “nature” of sexed bodies, compulsory heterosexuality, and dualistically delineated gender.
Appropriation, consequently, does not imply an embracing of the dominant culture’s gender roles and goals. Instead, a radical reimagining of bodily meaning and sexual significance refuses to let heteropatriarchy claim the erotic as its private property; the lesbian phallus disrupts the logic that seeks to fashion desire and penetration into points of entry for domination through linguistic denial of subjectivity, binary models of gender and sexual subjugation. This insistent search for true deep desire is the ultimate weapon against the stiff spectre of phallogocentrism. Whether it operates in the structures of genderqueerness, butch/femme, or other permutations of lesbian gender, whether it manifests through an inquisitive tongue or silicone strap-on, whether or not it eventually crosses boundaries of sexed bodies and sexual object choice, the lesbian phallus creates and honors multiple sites of pleasure and permutations of desire.
(complete with footnotes, cos that's how much of a theorydork I really am:
1. Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. (NY: Routledge, 1991) pg. 178.
2. Olson, Alix, “Cute for A Girl.” from the album Built Like That (Subtle Sister Productions: 2002.)
3. Freud, Sigmund, “Medusa’s Head.” James Strachey’s translation published in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 22 (1941), 69.
4. Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter. (NY: Routledge, 1993,) pg 59.
5. Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection. (NY: W.W. Norton & Company: 2002,) pg. 285.
6. Irigaray, Luce, “Speculum.” Quoted in Teresa de Lauretis’s essay “Sexual Indifference/Lesbian Representation.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Abelove, Henry; Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. (NY: Routledge, 1993) pg. 142.
7. Lotney, Karlyn (aka Fairy Butch), The Ultimate Guide to Strap-on Sex. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2000) pg. 141.
8. Thompson, William Irwin, Evil and World Order. (NY: Harper and Row, 1976.)
And also, if you read that, I'm sorry. Jess suggested I post it and I bet she's regretting I took her seriously now. But also, I've been thinking about how sexual orientation/preference is so obviously contingent upon structures of gender identities and sexed bodies, and yet I feel like it's a really important place for me to identify. Thoughts?
appropriate my fist!--lesbian transformation of the phallus
“Why should our bodies end at our skin?”
-Donna Haraway1
“She said, ‘no, it’s dick I’m after, darlin’
and she headed for the door.
I said, ‘if it’s dick you’re after, darlin,
try my top dresser drawer.’”
-Alix Olson2
In patriarchal myth, the Gorgon is a big scary dyke. “The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone,” Freud relates conspiratorially in his 1922 essay.3 He goes on to declare that a multiplicity of what he called “penis symbols” signify castration; perhaps it would be more accurate to suggest that they evoke terror because they indicate female appropriation of the phallus. This would allow for a reading of Medusa as quite a lesbian menace! She has, horror of horrors, a plethora of nonpenile phallic symbols against which the frightened male spectator can only assert his singular omnipotent erection. But what if the phallus is not inherently singular and steady? Do plasticity and transferability suggest a monstrous threat to heterosexist, hegemonic sexuality?
As evidenced by the nightmarish figure of the Gorgon, radically-appropriated proliferations of phallic images do strike fear into the hearts of those who have a lot at stake in maintaining their dominion in the domain of sexuality. Where there’s fear there’s power, the saying goes, so what are the potentials for transformative relocation of the phallus? It is significant, in considering this challenge, to note that the Gorgon’s petrifying power arises in part as a result of both her emasculating rejection and usurpation of the phallus. Therefore, appropriation of the phallus entails a rejection of the penis as the sole, supreme, singular embodiment of phallic powers which are assumed to be the natural property of men. This destabilizes the unspoken assumption that the penis is the “real,” primary phallus which generates normative patterns of heterosexuality around castration anxiety. Uprooting the notion of some so-called “real” phallus actually generates a meaningful erotogenicity whereby “the very vacillation between between real and imagined body parts”4 allows for a kaleidoscoping of sexual possibilities.
Phallogocentrism is the holographic backbone of patriarchal law, language, and sexuality. Taken together, the assembled components of phallic power and symbolism create a shimmering, monolithic hologram just as they individually contain and reproduce the illusory fixed meaning and positionality of that bastion of patriarchy: the phallus. The primacy of the phallus as the singular, privileged signifier serves to consolidate the meaning of that which is signified-- but what, precisely, is being marked by the phallus? And why is so much energy invested in securing the phallus within a rigid heterosexual narrative where deviance equals degeneration?
Since the phallus is not, according to Lacan, a phantasy, object, or organ5, it figures in a more subtle and insidious way as a marker of binary power relations. To “be” the phallus is to wield the threat of castration, to be in the position of granting or withholding erotic fulfillment, and yet have no subjectivity. To “have” the phallus, then, is to be the ultimate, possessing subject, to have one’s sexuality signified by this great power and yet always fear its loss. Clearly, this dynamic of being and having is situated in an extremely dualistic, hetero-sexual economy where male masculinity is formed by the subject’s claim to the phallus. When the boychild has his méconnaisance, this erroneous image of omnipotence is predicated on a synecdochical privilege. The boy has the phallus because he has the penis; this soft little organ stands in for the whole slew of phallic powers granted him as part and parcel of his natural, innate “right” to masculinity.
In his essay on the mirror stage, Lacan makes penile méconnaisance the process by which all structures of the ego are formed (Lacan 6). By conflating the penis with the phallus, this narrative of self-recognition gives ideal-I subjectivity and language only to those male-assigned people with testicles and a penis dangling between their legs. It is incredibly damaging that the penis is installed as the ultimate phallus and then christened the identifier of that-which-can-claim being. Obviously the issue of subjectivity within the hierarchical dualism of being/having is not incidental to the notion of lesbian appropriation of the phallus; the relocation of the phallus outside “the father and his law” offers alternatives to the penetration of this his-story into people’s bodies and psyches.
To understand how patriarchal phallogocentrism locates the penis in a metonymic relationship to the phallus, one has to examine how and why the phallus is the privileged signifier, the origin of a chain of significations. Despite his previous vocal protestations to the contrary, Lacan explains the generative function of the phallus by equating it to the penis. Of the phallus, he writes, “It can be said that this signifier is chosen because it is the most tangible element in the real of sexual copulation” (Lacan 287). Making the penis the privileged signifier is an anxious response to the metonymic string of significations marked by the phallus. “The phallus is installed as an ‘origin’,” posits Butler, “precisely to suppress the ambivalence produced in the course of that slide.” When the penis and the phallus are conflated, she continues, the phallus acts “as the (symbolic) ideal that offers an impossible and originary measure for the genitals to approximate, and as the (imaginary) anatomy which is marked by the failure to accomplish that return to the symbolic ideal” (Butler 61). The insistence on the penis as the original site of signification can now be seen as a grasping attempt to fix meaning to an exclusive body part-- but what possibilities are opened up by ripping into the ambiguities so desperately self-concealed and naturalized by this anxiously-avowed stasis?
Perhaps some radical potential lies in turning the tools of phallogocentrism against itself, in insisting on ironic and inverting readings that reveal the cracks in supposedly-omnipotent logic. Erotogenicity- the oscillation in awareness between real and imagined body parts- plays a key part in certain psychoanalytic stories of ego formation. While méconnaisance builds an inflated sense of self through the (invariably male) subject’s externalized ideas of his body’s boundaries and capabilities, erotogenicity is the process by which bodily sensation is conveyed via the idea of body parts’ abilities to sense and send sexual stimulation. In phallogocentric logic, the penis gains its primacy through a string of significations and substitutions where the male genitals are situated as “an originary site of erotogenization which then subsequently becomes the occasion for a set of substitutions or displacements” (Butler 60).
However, this origin-myth has a major faultline. Erotogenicity is, after all, generated through the transmission of bodily awareness through an idea. “As a result,” Butler explains, ”it would not be possible to speak about a body part that precedes and gives rise to an idea, for it is the idea that emerges simultaneously with the phenomenologically accessible body” (Butler 59). Suddenly, erotogenicity reveals its great subversive potential! It no longer appears utterly rational to appoint the penis the origin of significance because, in the transmission of pleasure through “real” and imagined body parts, body parts don’t give rise to erotic meaning. Instead, an appropriative reading of erotogenicity invalidates the arrogantly stable location within the heterosexual matrix granted to the penis/phallus as privileged signifier.
Upsetting the complacent, fiercely-straight masculinity to which dichotomies of being and having are bound creates some intriguing possibilities for subversive pleasure. Since the process of erotogenicity actually ends up annihilating Lacan’s notion of penis-as-privileged-phallus, it means that the phallus can be resignified because it is indeed transferable. To put it another way, to insist on the shifting meanings and transferability of the phallus is to refuse to “prefigure and valorize which body part will be the site of erotogenization” (Butler 62). When the penis is no longer the favored site of phallic meaning which is somehow more “real” than other body parts, a myriad of deliciously-deviant erotics can prism forth from the fissures of patriarchy’s symbolic order.
Before exploring the polymorphously-pleasurable possibilities of the lesbian phallus, however, it is necessary to deal with the possible criticism levelled against it. Speaking on what Teresa de Lauretis would later name “sexual indifference,” Luce Irigaray declares that within the phallogocentric economy of the sex which is one, “there will be no female homosexuality, just a hommo-sexuality in which women will be involved in the same process of specularizing the phallus, begged to maintain the desire for the same that man has...”6 In this context, any notion of the lesbian phallus could be construed (and subsequently dismissed) as nothing more than false, masculinized consciousness. The lesbian phallus would then be seen as a capitulation to normative androcentric sexual goals. And why, the thinking goes, would lesbians enshrine what is a fundamental symbol of male domination in the first place?
So do queer bodies (and, more to the point, dyke sex) threaten hegemonic compulsory heterosexuality, rather than simply reinforce its phallogocentric power structure? First, carefully queer readings of psychoanalytic doctrine prove that the phallus must be dissociated from its erroneous equation to the penis; this is precisely what lesbian appropriation accomplishes. When dykes usurp the phallus from its virulently-defended position in a penile/phallic economy, we act in absolute opposition to the phallogocentrism which depends on male possession of the phallus and acquiescent female embodiment of the phallic power to grant men sexual satisfaction. This radical reimagining situates the phallus outside of biologically-deterministic heterosexuality and refuses to take straight sex (and congruently sexed-and-gendered bodies) as the natural, generative model of need, desire and pleasure.
Exclusivity is the central tenet of phallogocentric consolidation of power; the phallus is “supposed” to be the sole property of male-assigned men. Once the phallus is dislocated from the penis, it gives way to a liberatory proliferation of significations and situations. This is the second blow queer appropriation strikes to phallogocentrism, and it hits below the belt. Butch cock, a genderqueer dyke’s forearm, a transman’s penis, a femme’s silicone strap-on-- these are all examples of penetrative body parts imbued with significance and erotic power, meaning, and sensation. Needless to say, the penis is not granted a privileged position in this multiplicious litany of queer manifestations of phallic sexualities. The potential for radical reinscriptions of the phallus suggests that it is only when situated in a dominating context (which may be more specifically described as a rigidly heterosexist, gender-normative phallocracy that upholds the penis-phallus equation) that it becomes a tool of domination. Refusing to abandon the phallus to narratives which proclaim it the exclusive property of men is a potentially radical act.
What, then, are the juicy realities of lesbian proliferations of the phallus? First, one must think back to erotogenicity and the revelation that real and imagined body parts are pivotal in defining the body’s boundaries and sensations. When Judith Butler asks, “what is meant by the imaginary construction of body parts?” (Butler 59) she is urging a reimagining of consciousness and the body.
An explicit example of this erotic extension of consciousness is strap-on sex. For some dykes, strapping on a dildo is not related to gender play or trans identity; it is simply another way to enjoy partner sex. (For proof of this playfulness, witness the availability of smoothly-cylindrical toys formed of marbled pink silicone and spiked with glitter.) For others, strap-ons provide an opportunity to integrate their interpretation of their physical body with their gender expression. “The more familiar you are with both the reality and the fantasy of that organ,” writes Karlyn Lotney, “the more your strap-on will become a conduit for exchanging energy and sensuality between you and your partner-- and less an inert device. Strengthening the relationship between your sexual imagination and your tactile imagination,” she continues, ”can help you experience a stronger connection with your partner and greater physical pleasure from strap-on sex.”7 When they are moved out of the language of theory, it becomes even more clear that so-called “imaginary body parts” can be imbued with multiple erotic meanings. Strap-on rigs are also, of course, as close to a literal embodiment of the transferability of the phallus as one is likely to find.
Strap-ons are only one possibility in a multitude of manifestations of the lesbian phallus. A tongue, a forearm, a fist; a thigh, a hipbone, fingers---all can be considered symbolic of “having” the phallus, at the same time that their placement in a queer context suggests a collapsing of the very binary of being and having so essential to constructions of heterosexuality. Considering the vast array of subversively sexual phallic powers at dykes’ disposal, it is easy to imagine how proliferations of phallic symbols could be construed as castrating. Still, the lesbian phallus is only castrating if the phallus is conflated with the penis to the extent that its meaning is pinned to this organ as the sole site of meaning.
With this in mind, Freud’s assertion that the terrified male spectator gets hard as an apotropaic defense against the Gorgon seems silly. “To display the penis,” he insists, “is to say: ‘I am not afraid of you. I defy you. I have a penis” (Freud 213). The hero may have the penis, but this is not so helpful when the phallus is so clearly not rooted in this organ as origin. As evidenced by the complex signifying chain of metonymy and erotogenicity, the phallus-as-structure is constantly reiterated, reinscribed, and, therefore, re-created and open to beautiful morphological mutations.
When Freud maintains that the erect penis has apotropaic powers, he reveals an anxious awareness of the lesbian menace to hegemonic matrices of sexual power. “Here, then, is another way of intimidating the Evil Spirit,” he asserts. One cannot help but wonder: who or what is the evil spirit? Could it be that which does not have the penis and in fact rejects the penis as the sole source of power? If evil is indeed the annunciation of a new order,8 the lesbian phallus is a monstrous threat to the old (symbolic) order. Phallogocentrism is profoundly injured when the phallus is subjected to lesbian appropriation. This appropriation is subversive when it reveals the anatomical “fact” of sex, of clearly-delineated bodies and powers, as a phallacy.
In opposition to the unifying stasis sought by patriarchal phallogocentrism, the lesbian phallus exists in shifting borderlands and draws strength from apparent paradox. “When the phallus is lesbian, then it is and is not a masculinist figure of power; the signifier is significantly split, for it both recalls and displaces the masculinism by which it is impelled,” admits Butler. “And insofar as it operates as the site of anatomy,” she continues,” the phallus (re)produces the spectre of the penis only to enact its vanishing, to reiterate and exploit its perpetual vanishing as the very occasion of the phallus” (Butler 89). The lesbian phallus is a thorn in the side of the dominant cultural paradigm obsessed with maintaining the fixed “nature” of sexed bodies, compulsory heterosexuality, and dualistically delineated gender.
Appropriation, consequently, does not imply an embracing of the dominant culture’s gender roles and goals. Instead, a radical reimagining of bodily meaning and sexual significance refuses to let heteropatriarchy claim the erotic as its private property; the lesbian phallus disrupts the logic that seeks to fashion desire and penetration into points of entry for domination through linguistic denial of subjectivity, binary models of gender and sexual subjugation. This insistent search for true deep desire is the ultimate weapon against the stiff spectre of phallogocentrism. Whether it operates in the structures of genderqueerness, butch/femme, or other permutations of lesbian gender, whether it manifests through an inquisitive tongue or silicone strap-on, whether or not it eventually crosses boundaries of sexed bodies and sexual object choice, the lesbian phallus creates and honors multiple sites of pleasure and permutations of desire.
(complete with footnotes, cos that's how much of a theorydork I really am:
1. Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. (NY: Routledge, 1991) pg. 178.
2. Olson, Alix, “Cute for A Girl.” from the album Built Like That (Subtle Sister Productions: 2002.)
3. Freud, Sigmund, “Medusa’s Head.” James Strachey’s translation published in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 22 (1941), 69.
4. Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter. (NY: Routledge, 1993,) pg 59.
5. Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection. (NY: W.W. Norton & Company: 2002,) pg. 285.
6. Irigaray, Luce, “Speculum.” Quoted in Teresa de Lauretis’s essay “Sexual Indifference/Lesbian Representation.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Abelove, Henry; Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. (NY: Routledge, 1993) pg. 142.
7. Lotney, Karlyn (aka Fairy Butch), The Ultimate Guide to Strap-on Sex. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2000) pg. 141.
8. Thompson, William Irwin, Evil and World Order. (NY: Harper and Row, 1976.)
And also, if you read that, I'm sorry. Jess suggested I post it and I bet she's regretting I took her seriously now. But also, I've been thinking about how sexual orientation/preference is so obviously contingent upon structures of gender identities and sexed bodies, and yet I feel like it's a really important place for me to identify. Thoughts?
