Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity by Sheila Whiteley

Author:Sheila Whiteley [Whiteley, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

8

CHALLENGING THE FEMININE

Annie Lennox, androgyneity and illusions of identity

Masculine discourse has never been able to understand woman, or the feminine, as anything other than a reflection of man, or the masculine. Thus, it is impossible to think the ‘feminine feminine’ within the structures of patriarchal thought. When men look at women, they see not women but reflections, or images and likenesses, of men.1

Rosemary Tong's discussion of a patriarchal discourse which has informed such thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Lacan, returns the reader to the debates surrounding sameness and the suppression of difference. Apart from her sexuality, her biological marker of sex, the woman is merely a reflection of man, the same as man. Her sexuality, because it cannot mirror the male's, is thus a lack, an absence of the male's. Where she does not reflect man, she does not exists and is therefore unrepresentable. In terms of thought there is thus a linguistic absence, and within a language system that relies on an all-pervasive masculinity, the feminine is inevitably and irrevocably excluded.

The idea that woman does not have a sex,2 that she does not exist is clearly problematic, not least in discussions surrounding identity and representation. Political representation, for example, has relied on extending legitimacy to women as visible political subjects, identifying the customary and legal constraints that block their access to, or success in, the public domain. Gender justice hinges on equality but, as Irigaray cautions, ‘Woman could be man's equal. In this case she would enjoy, in a more or less near future, the same economic, social, political rights as men. She would be a potential man.’3 Irigaray's concern that emancipatory feminism could be subsumed within a pre-established male discourse (that ‘she could be a potential man’) is equally relevant to the debates surrounding the ways in which gender and sexuality have served to subordinate women to men. If representation is a normative function of language, patriarchal language systems can never adequately represent women as the structures are themselves misogynistic.

The assumption of a universal basis for feminism (that oppression has a singular discernible form) is equally problematic. For theorists such as Luce Irigaray, there is only one sex, the masculine, and as such women constitute simply the fetish of representation. They are the relation of difference, excluded by conventional systems of Western culture. Notions of binary opposition (male/female, masculine/feminine) thus conceal the power of hegemonic masculinity by constantly positioning the woman as the negative other of the omnipresent masculine subject.

Irigaray's critique of Freud (that the differentiation into two sexes depends on the assumption that the girl child must become a man minus the penis) rests largely on her celebration of the psychic and somatic dimensions of desire that Freud had either excluded or suppressed. Having insisted that women devote very little mental energy to autoeroticism, autorepresentation (and she includes here lesbians), Irigaray focuses attention on representations of representations that remind women of her sex, her sex organs, her sexes. She stresses the delights of caresses,

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