Explicit Utopias by Amalia Ziv

Author:Amalia Ziv [Ziv, Amalia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781438457093
Google: cZ4ZCgAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 26450049
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2015-07-06T03:07:27+00:00

Lesbian Phallus/Lesbian Fetish

One subset of feminist theoretical engagement with the phallus consists of attempts to employ psychoanalysis to articulate lesbian desire and subjectivity. Interestingly, two such attempts turn to Freud’s theory of fetishism for a model of lesbian desire. In a sense, an appropriation of fetishism by women is analogous to an appropriation of the phallus, since, like the phallus, fetishism enjoys the status of an exclusively male attribute, and the theory of fetishism presupposes female castration.

In “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” Freud defines fetishism as a sexual overvaluation of a part of the body or an inanimate object (153). His later essay “Fetishism” explains this overvaluation as stemming from the fact that the fetish is a substitute for the mother’s imaginary penis “that had been extremely important [to the boy] in early childhood” (152). Since the perception of women’s “castration” arouses in the boy anxiety of his own possible castration,12 he reacts to it by disavowal, that is, by simultaneously accepting the reality of female castration and retaining his belief in the female phallus.13 This dual mental attitude, which involves a splitting of the ego, is afforded by the substitution of the fetish for the phallus:

Yes, in his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest which was formerly directed to its predecessor. (“Fetishism” 154)

The overvaluation of the fetish is explained as the displaced proper valuation of the phallus. The shoe, the fur, the nose are overvalued; the phallus is not. In this way, Freud’s theory of fetishism exposes the status of the phallus in psychoanalysis as the proper and originary locus of value.

It is true that the phallus at stake is “not just any old phallus,” as Elizabeth Grosz reminds us, but the mother’s phallus, which “endows her with power and authority” (“Lesbian Fetishism?” 42), but this begs the question of what makes the penis into the signifier of power and authority, such that the little boy must assume its possession by the mother whom he perceives as powerful. This question lends support to Teresa de Lauretis’s suggestion that the maternal phallus is in fact none other than the paternal phallus, only missing (Practice 224), since where if not in the figure of the father could the penis acquire the signification of power and authority? The fact that the phallus is the proper locus of value not only for the child but for the adult male as well is borne out by Freud’s remark that the fetish “saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects,” that is, a substitute phallus (Freud, “Fetishism” 154). In the ensuing paragraph, Freud admits that he is in fact unable to account for male heterosexuality; since women lack that which would make them “tolerable as sexual objects,” it is unclear how heterosexual men who are not fetishists resolve the difficulty.

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