Lynda hart+ THAT WAS THEN: THIS IS NOW: EX-CHANGING THE PHALLUS

HART, 'THAT WAS THEN: THIS IS NOW: EX-CHANGING THE PHALLUS', Postmodern Culture v4n1
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          THAT WAS THEN: THIS IS NOW: EX-CHANGING THE PHALLUS

                                  by

                               LYNDA HART
                         Department of English
                    The University of Pennsylvania

             _Postmodern Culture_ v.4 n.1 (September, 1993)
                           pmc@unity.ncsu.edu

              Copyright (c) 1993 by Lynda Hart, all rights
              reserved.  This text may be used and shared in
              accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S.
              copyright law, and it may be archived and
              redistributed in electronic form, provided that
              the editors are notified and no fee is charged for
              access.  Archiving, redistribution, or
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              notification of the publisher, Oxford University
              Press.


[1]       In _A Taste for Pain_, Maria Marcus recounts an
    anecdote about a women's studies conference in 1972.
    Germaine Greer, the keynote speaker, was interrupted by a
    young woman from the audience who suddenly cried out: "But
    how can we start a women's movement when I bet
    three-quarters of us sitting in this room are masochists?"
    Greer replied: "Yes, we know women are masochists--that's
    what it's all about!"^1^
[2]       Twenty years later, I am more likely to hear the
    complaint that all women are masochists in the context of
    lesbians lamenting the scarcity of tops in the community.
    Whether they are "real" butches, or the newly popular femme-
    tops, a good top is hard to find; most lesbians prefer being
    bottoms.
[3]       While feminists continue to debate the pros and cons of
    lesbian sexual practices, "masochism," the term that has
    become synonomous for some feminists with internalized
    oppression, has undergone a theoretical renaissance in which
    the erotics of submission have been reclaimed by a diverse
    group of scholars as an emancipatory sexuality for men. 
    Indeed if we are to follow Leo Bersani's argument, which
    strikingly concludes that "sexuality--at least in the mode
    in which it is constituted--could be thought of as a
    tautology for masochism," anti-s/m feminist arguments would
    be tantamount to barring women from sex altogether.^2^
[4]       For feminists who are struggling to articulate a sexual
    subjectivity that does not submit to the psychoanalytic
    imperative of an exclusively masculine libido, which
    ineluctably consigns femininity to a masculinized fetish,
    Bersani's theory might be welcomed since it takes us out of
    the discourse of the symptom into a "nonreferential version
    of sexual thought."  Parental identifications, which
    inevitably reify Oedipus, are no longer constitutive; and
    the "lost object," which is relentlessly relegated to a
    feminized fetish, is diffused so that any object and any
    part of the body can become an erotogenic zone.^3^  This
    theory does not of course undo the historical/social
    attribution of masochism to women, but it does suggest a
    psychic model in which the sexual positions one takes up are
    not necessarily gendered.  Nevertheless, Bersani implicitly
    assumes the now privileged masochistic position as a male
    preogative, and hence claims sexuality itself for men.  This
    presumption is clearer in his essay, "Is the Rectum a
    Grave?" when he describes the dominant culture's revulsion
    at the sight of a man seductively and intolerably imaged
    with "legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal
    ecstasy of being a woman."^4^
[5]       This is a graphic enactment of Freud's third form of
    masochism, "feminine masochism," which he also presumes to
    be occupied by a male subject in a feminine situation.  The
    male subject in this space signifies "being castrated, or
    copulated with, or giving birth to a baby."^5^  Since women
    presumably already experience one or more of the above, the
    notion of a feminine "feminine masochism" is redundant at
    best, if not impossible.  In short, linguistically masculine
    feminine masochism is performative; feminine feminine
    masochism is constative.  The latter merely reports an
    adequation; it corresponds with the "facts."  The feminist
    campaign to free women from their masochism was never then
    about giving up something that they had, but extricating
    women from something that they were. 
[6]       Although Kaja Silverman acknowledges that
    psychoanalytic sexual difference relegates female masochism
    to a virtually ontological condition when she defends her
    focus on male subjectivity by explaining that the female
    subject's masochism is difficult to conceptualize as
    perverse because it represents "such a logical extension of
    those desires which are assumed to be 'natural' for the
    female subject," she nonetheless accepts and repeats the
    terms of a psychoanalytic symbolic in which there is only
    one libido and it is masculine.^6^  Women are denied sexual
    agency because they are incapable of mimesis.  Their options
    are to take up the position of passive "normal femininity,"
    or to reverse the position and appropriate masculine
    subjectivity and its desires, in which case they can
    "perform" sexuality, but only through their "masculinity
    complex."  Bersani's desire is aimed at the pleasures gay
    men might experience from an alignment with femininity, as
    is Silverman's, though her project is to produce a
    revolutionary subject in a "feminine" yet heterosexual man.
    Both of these analyses add weight to feminist arguments
    against sadomasochism, for following their logic the lesbian
    masochist is either enacting the dominant culture's
    degradation of women or she is playing out the desire to be
    a man.  Even if she psychically occupies the position of a
    man with another man, she is still only a "fag hag" within
    the terms of sexual difference.  These theories that posit
    male masochism as emancipatory thus continue to depend on
    the impossibility of desire between women.  In this context,
    truth claims about lesbian sexuality such as this one made
    by Jan Brown,
         We practice the kind of sex in which cruelty has
         value, where mercy does not.  What keeps those of us
         who refused to abandon our "unacceptable" fantasies
         sane is the knowledge that there are others like us
         who would not leave because we scream "Kill me," at
         the moment we orgasm. . . .  We lied to you about
         controlling the fantasy.  It is the lack of control
         that makes us come, that has the only power to
         move us . . . .^7^
    would easily fall prey to the argument that lesbian 
    sadomasochists are merely reproducing heterosexist models,
    or at best, male homosocial ones.  The referent for Brown's
    "lies" can be located in earlier rhetoric by s/m
    practitioners who justified the acting out of their
    fantasies by claiming they were means of exorcising their
    real hold on the individual.  Tacitly accepting the
    feminist contention that s/m lesbians had internalized
    cultural misogyny, these defenses asked for a tolerant
    reprieve, a period of playing through the fantasies in order
    to transcend them.  S/M then, ironically, became
    therapeutic, like a homeopathic cure. 
[7]       Theatrical metaphors were central to this defense.
    Susan Farr, for example, described s/m as "pure theatre," "a
    drama [in which] two principals . . . act at being master
    and slave, play at being fearsome and fearful."  She cites
    the clues to the drama in the interchangeability of the
    roles and the repetitive, scripted dialogue.  Even though,
    she acknowledges, much of the scene may be "pure
    improvisation," it is still "theater."^8^  This dialectic
    between the scriptural and the spontaneous is prevalent in
    early pro s/m accounts.  On the one hand, there is the
    insistence that the scene is rigidly controlled, with a
    decided emphasis on the bottom's mastery of the limits.  On
    the other hand, the eroticism depends on the anticipation
    that the limits will be pushed to the breaking point, that
    the "scene" will cross over into the "real." 
[8]       To a certain extent, the controversy about whether s/m
    is "real" or performed is naive, since we are always already
    in representation even when we are enacting our seemingly
    most private fantasies.  The extent to which we recognize
    the presence of the edge of the stage may determine what
    kind of performance we are enacting, but willing ourselves
    to forget the stage altogether is not to return to the real,
    as s/m opponents would have it; rather, this will to forget
    is classical mimesis, which, as Derrida points out, is "the
    most naive form of representation."^9^  Nevertheless, it is
    precisely this most naive form of representation that would
    seem to be the most desirable of sexual performances.
    Bersani's objections to the frequent theorization of such
    things as "the gay-macho style, the butch-fem lesbian
    couple, and gay and lesbian sado-masochism" as . . .
    "subversive parodies of the very formations and behaviours
    they appear to ape," rather than, "unqualified and
    uncontrollable complicities with, correlatively, "a brutal
    and misogynous ideal of masculinity" [gay macho], . . . "the
    heterosexual couple permanently locked into a power
    structure of male sexual and social mastery over female
    sexual and social passivity" [butch-fem], or "fascism"
    [s/m], are clearly based on his contention that these sexual
    practices are not performative.  Parody, Bersani states
    emphatically, "is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know
    this."^10^  Although Bersani audaciously speaks for all gay
    men, I would have to agree with him and add that many
    lesbians know this too.  Self-conscious mimicry of
    heterosexuality is a side show; when the main act comes to
    town, we all want the "real thing," or, more precisely, we
    all want the Real thing.  That is, sexuality is always, I
    think, about our desire for the impossible-real, not the
    real of the illusion that passes for reality, but the Real
    that eludes symbolization. 
[9]       Lesbian s/m erotica has become increasingly assertive
    about claiming dildoes as the "real thing."  Although strap-
    ons are advertised as "toys," inside the narratives and
    testimonials of lesbian s/m practitioners references to an
    outside or a "model" are most often discarded in favor of
    descriptions that simply occupy the status of the real.  So,
    for example, it has become common to speak of "watching her
    play with her dick,"  or "sucking her off," or "your dick
    find[ing] its way inside of me."^11^  As one contributor to
    _Quim_ puts it: "When I put on a strap on I feel male.  I
    feel my dick as real otherwise I can't use it well."^12^
    Rarely if ever does one find lesbian erotica that refers to
    the dildo as a joke, an imitation, or a substitute, whether
    these narratives are explicitly in an s/m context or in the
    more prevalent accounts of butch/femme vanilla erotica.  On
    the contrary, the erotic charge of these narratives depends
    on both tops and bottoms, butches and femmes exhibiting
    nothing less than respect for the "phallic" instrument. 
[10]      Bersani's argument about gay macho depends on this
    notion of respect for masculinity as a model.  But the slide
    from gay macho to lesbian butch-fem and s/m is too facilely
    made.  Whereas gay macho's "mad identifications" are between
    gay and straight men, which he argues is a "direct line (not
    so heavily mediated) from excitement to sexuality,"^13^ the
    identifications made by b/f and s/m lesbians follow a more
    circuitous route in which the condensations and
    displacements are more complex.  Most obviously, gay macho's
    relationship to straight masculinity remains a homo-sexual
    affair; whereas lesbian b/f and s/m, as long as we are
    caught within the logic of this binary, would be hetero-
    sexual.  In both cases, however, the erotic charge can only
    be articulated within the terms of a symbolic order that
    depends for its coherency on maintaining the distinction
    between homosexuality and heterosexuality.  Nonetheless,
    even within the terms of this symbolic order, which I
    presume is what Bersani refers to when he speaks of sex "as
    we know it," there is already dissidence, rather than
    resemblence, in the image of a woman penetrating another
    woman with a dildo.  Although both might be interpreted as a
    yearning toward "masculinity," in the gay man's case it is a
    masculinity that the dominant culture at least marginally
    assigns to him and that he thus might willingly surrender.
    In the lesbian top's case, it is a "masculinity" that she
    aggressively appropriates without any prior cultural
    ownership only then to give it up.  If we look at it from
    the bottom's perspective, there is quite a difference
    between the gay man who cannot "refuse the suicidal ecstasy
    of being a woman," and the lesbian who is presumed by the
    dominant sexual order already to be a woman. 
[11]      Over a decade ago, Monique Wittig implicitly enjoined
    us to write The Symbolic Order with a slash through the
    article, just as Lacan writes The Woman, when she made her
    then startling announcment that "Lesbians are not
    women."^14^  The straight mind, she pointed out, "speaks of
    the difference between the sexes, the symbolic order, the
    Unconsious . . . giving an absolute meaning to these
    concepts when they are only categories founded upon
    heterosexuality . . . ."^15^  Returning to this article, it
    is interesting to remember that the example Wittig chooses
    to demonstrate the material oppression effected through
    discourses is pornography.  Pornography, she argues,
    signifies simply that "women are dominated."^16^  Thus
    Wittig might be aligned with Mackinnon when she argues that
    pornography "institutionalizes the sexuality of male
    supremacy, fusing the eroticization of dominance and
    submission with the social construction of male and
    female."^17^  It is this position that Bersani perversely
    asks us to reconsider when he temporarilly allies himself
    with Mackinnon and Dworkin only in order to argue for the
    necessity of proliferating pornography rather than banning
    it.  However, if the ultimate logic of the radical feminist
    argument for the realism of porn is "the criminalization of
    sex itself until it has been reinvented,"^18^ whether one
    takes up a position for or against pornography on this
    basis, are we not then already acceding to the "straight
    mind" that can only think homosexuality as "nothing but
    heterosexuality"?^19^
[12]      What has fallen out of these discussions is
    heterosexuality as a social contract, one that as Wittig
    argues can not only be but already is broken by practicing
    lesbians.  For when we hear of "sex as we know it" or the
    ultimate logic of anti-porn feminists as the
    "criminalization of sex," this "sex" is always already
    heterosexuality, and implicitly, a relationship of identity
    between the phallus and the penis.  Lacan seems to free us
    from this difficulty when he argues that the Phallus is a
    signifier (without a signified), not a body part, nor a
    partial object, nor an imaginary construct.^20^  However, in
    her recent reading of Lacan's "The Meaning of the Phallus,"
    back through "The Mirror Stage," Judith Butler shows that
    Lacan's denial of the Phallus as an imaginary effect is
    "constitutive of the Phallus as a privileged signifier."^21^
    At the risk of reductively summarizing her nuanced argument,
    what Butler's essay seems to conclude is that the Symbolic
    is always only a masculine imaginary that produces the
    Phallus as its privileged signifier by denying the
    mechanisms of its own production. 
[13]      Lacan's move to locate the Phallus within the Symbolic
    presumably breaks its relation of identity with the penis
    since symbolization "depletes that which is symbolized of
    its ontological connection with the symbol itself."^22^ 
    Just as Magritte's painting of a pipe is not a/the pipe, so
    the penis and phallus are not equivalent.^23^  But, as
    Butler points out, they do retain a priveleged relationship
    to one another through "determinate negation."^24^  If
    symbolization is what effects ontological disconnection, we
    might ask what happens to those "pipes" that are excessive
    to representation.  Would not those things that cannot take
    place within any given symbolic end up accorded a
    radically negative ontological status?  Would they not, in
    other words, become that which is real, and therefore
    impossible?^25^
[14]       When Wittig argues that rejecting heterosexuality and
    its institutions is, from the straight mind's perspective,
    "simply an impossibility" since to do so would mean
    rejecting the "symbolic order" and therefore the
    constitution of meaning "without which no one can maintain
    an internal coherence,"^26^ she seems to suggest that the
    straight mind simply denies the possibility of lesbianism.
    But phallocentrism/heterosexism does not merely secure its
    dominance through a simple negation.  Rather, it needs
    lesbianism as a negative ontology.  It needs its status as
    both radically real and impossible. 
[15]      That this is the case can be seen in Silverman's
    reconceptualization of the borders of male subjectivity in
    which her analysis at once ignores lesbian sexuality and
    persistently depends on it as yet another instance of a
    constitutive outside.  Determined to undo the tenacious
    assumption that there are only two possible sexual subject
    positions, Silverman ends by positing three possible "same-
    sex" combinations: 1. two morphological men 2. a gay man and
    a lesbian [both occupying psychically masculine positions]
    3. a lesbian and a gay man [both occupying psychically
    feminine positions].^27^  Given Silverman's sophisticated
    psychoanalytic rendering of the body's imaginary production,
    it might sound naive to suggest that the latter two
    positions are morphologically heterosexual, i.e., one of
    each.  Yet she retains the category of two morphological
    men, so there is obviously still some recourse to a
    materiality of the body outside its imaginary formations. 
[16]       Silverman concludes her book by asserting that her
    third paradigm for male homosexuality has the "most
    resonance for feminism," which she claims to represent
    politically.^28^  But what is striking is that this is the
    only place in her analysis where lesbianism is represented.
    For it is in this most politically productive model of male
    homosexuality that the "authorial subjectivity" can be
    accessed "only through lesbianism."^29^  What could this
    "lesbianism" be if not two morphologically female bodies,
    which oddly do not appear in her liberating models for
    "same-sex" desire?  The feminism that Silverman speaks for
    politically is once again a heterosexual feminism; for her
    ability to make cases for imaginary gay sexualities is only
    intelligible through the assumption of a lesbian sexuality
    that remains stable and constitutively outside her
    recombinations of the relationships between psychic
    identifications and imaginary morphologies.  Thus she
    depends on the orthodoxy of the impossibility of lesbian
    desire in order to challenge and break with the other
    orthodoxies that limit sexual choices for (heterosexual)
    women. 
[17]       The model that proposes the impossiblity of lesbian
    desire, constructed as two morphological females with
    psychic feminine identities, is impossible within
    psychoanalytic terms precisely because there is no desire
    without a phallic signifier.  In order for lesbianism to
    escape from its stabilizing function as the place-holder of
    a lack, Butler's fictive lesbian phallus would seem to be
    indispensable.  Yet there is still in this formulation a
    submission to psychoanalytic orthodoxy; and lesbian sado-
    masochists have thought of much more interesting ways to
    practice dominance and submission. 
[18]        Suppose we agree with Bersani's argument that
    phallocentrism is "above all the denial of the value of
    powerlessness in both men and women,"^30^ and consider what
    value women might find in powerlessness.  I would agree with
    Tania Modleski that from a heterosexual woman's perspective
    there might not be much to value in powerlessness.^31^  But
    from a lesbian perspective things look different.
    Powerlessness, in Bersani's argument, seems to mean little
    more than submitting to penetration.  When he takes
    anatomical considerations into account, he refers to the
    "real" of bodies which are constructed in such a way that
    "it's almost impossible not to associate mastery and
    subordination with intense pleasures."^32^  If the value of
    powerlessness is equivalent to being penetrated, note that
    the "woman" in Bersani's imaginary must be either a
    heterosexual female or a gay man.  Not only does Bersani
    then retain an equivalency between the phallus and the
    penis, but he also reinforces a morphological conflation of
    the vagina and the anus.  At the same time, he insists upon
    a fantasmatic gender distinction that depends on these
    anatomical parts as referents.  Bersani's argument, then,
    surely exceeds his intentions.  For while he means to value
    the powerlessness of both men and women, it is paradoxically
    between these two penetrable orifices, which are at once the
    same and different, that on their front/to/back axis the
    illusion of an impermeable male body is sustained.  As D.A.
    Miller puts it: "only between the woman and the homosexual
    together may the normal male subject imagine himself covered
    front and back."^33^
[19]       If, as Butler argues, Lacan retains a relationship of
    identity between the phallus and the penis through
    "determinate negation," it is also possible to understand
    the valorization of a masochism that is explicitly male as
    further consolidation of this relation of equivalence.  For
    male masochism, which presumably relinquishes the phallus by
    occupying the being of woman, would necessarily assume that
    she is the one who does not "have it."  In other words, it
    is only by giving it up that one gets it.  Hence the
    continuing postulation that female masochism is impossible
    depends on the assurance that she has nothing to give up.
    The female masochist would have to give up something that
    she does not have; and if she were represented as giving it
    up, then it would have to be admittted that the phallus is
    nothing more than an imaginary construct.  According to
    Freud's narrative, women are presumed to have once "had" the
    penis.  The phallus/penis as "lost object" always refers us
    to the past of a woman's body and the dreaded future of a
    man's body.  Hence the cultural horror associated with
    "becoming a woman."
[20]       Lesbians who regard their strap-ons as the "real
    thing" instigate a representational crisis by producing an
    imaginary in which the fetishistic/hallucinatory "return" of
    the penis onto a woman's body goes beyond the "transferable
    or plastic property"^34^ of the phallus to other body parts
    by depicting a phallus that has no reference to the "real"
    of the penis.  The lesbian-dick is the phallus as floating
    signifier that has no ground on which to rest.  It neither
    returns to the male body, originates from it, nor refers to
    it.  Lesbian-dicks are the ultimate simulacra.  They occupy
    the ontological status of the model, appropriate the
    privilege, and refuse to acknowledge an origin outside their
    own self-reflexivity.  They make claims to the real without
    submitting to "truth."  If the phallus was banned from
    feminist orthodoxy because it was presumed to signify the
    persistence of a masculine or heterosexual identification,
    and butch lesbians or s/m tops who wore strap-ons were thus
    represented, as Butler points out, as "vain and/or pathetic
    effort[s] to mime the real thing,"^35^ this "real thing" was
    at least two real things, which were only each other's
    opposites.  There was not much difference between the
    straight "real thing," and the lesbian "real thing," since
    the latter was only the absence of the former.  Both these
    prohibitions converged on the assumption of an identity
    between the phallus and the penis.  Without that
    identification, the top who wears the strap-on is not the
    one who "has" the phallus; rather it is always already the
    bottom who "has it" by giving up what no one can have.  In
    the lesbian imaginary, the phallus is not where it appears.
    That's why so many butches, as most lesbians know, are
    bottoms.  
-----------------------------------------------------------------

                             NOTES
    
         ^1^ Maria Marcus, _A Taste for Pain: on Masochism and
    Female Sexuality_, trans. Joan Tate (New York: St.
    Martin's Press, 1981), 181.

         ^2^  Leo Bersani, _The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis
    and Art_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 39.

         ^3^  Ibid, 45.

         ^4^  Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" in _AIDS:
    Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism_, ed. Douglas Crimp
    (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 212.

         ^5^ Sigmund Freud, "The Economic Problem in
    Masochism," _The Standard Edition of the Complete
    Psychological Works_, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth
    Press, 1966) vol. 19, 162.

         ^6^ Kaja Silverman, "Masochism and Male Subjectivity"
    _Camera Obscura_, 17 (1988), 52.

         ^7^ Jan Brown, "Sex, lies, and penetration: A Butch
    finally 'fesses up," _The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch
    Reader_, ed. Joan Nestle (Boston: Alyson Publications,
    1992), 412.

         ^8^ Susan Farr, "The Art of Discipline: Creating
    Erotic Dramas of Play and Power," _Coming to Power:
    Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M_ (Boston: Alyson, 1981)
    185.

         ^9^ Jacques Derrida, "The Theater of Cruelty and the
    Closure of Representation," _Writing and Difference_, trans.
    Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978),
    234.

         ^10^ Bersani, "Rectum," 208.

         ^11^ _Quim_, Issue 3 (Winter 1991), 10 and 13.  Similar
    language can be found in almost any issue of _On Our Backs_
    or _Bad Attitude_.  And, in fact, in periodicals such as the
    now defunct _Outrageous Women_ (which was published during
    the 80's) one also finds such references to "lesbian dicks,"
    sometimes without the qualifier.  What is apparent is that
    s/m dykes have always considered their dildoes to be the
    "real thing."

         ^12^ Anonymous, _Quim_ Issue 3 (Winter 1991), 36.

         ^13^ Bersani, "Rectum," 208.

         ^14^ Monique Wittig, "The Straight Mind," _The
    Straight Mind and Other Essays_ (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992)
    32.

         ^15^ Wittig, 27-28.

         ^16^ Ibid, 25.

         ^17^ Catherine A. MacKinnon, _Feminism Unmodified:
    Discourses on Life and Law_ (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard
    University Press, 1987), 3 and 172.

         ^18^ Bersani, "Rectum," 214.

         ^19^ Wittig, "The Straight Mind," 28.

         ^20^ Jacques Lacan, "The Meaning of the Phallus,"
    _Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole
    freudienne_, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W.W. Norton,
    1985), 74-85.

         ^21^ Judith Butler, "The Lesbian Phallus and the
    Morphological Imaginary," _differences_, "The Phallus
    Issue," 4, no.1 (Spring 1992), 156.

         ^22^ Ibid, 157.

         ^23^ Michel Foucault, _This is Not a Pipe_, trans. and
    ed. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California
    Press, 1982).

         ^24^ Butler, 157.

         ^25^ If the "realesbian" of lesbian-feminism was a
    socially impossible identity, so in the psychoanalytic
    symbolic are lesbians only possible in/as the "Real," since
    they are foreclosed from the Symbolic order--they drop out
    of symbolization.  If they can be signified at all it is
    only as an algebraic x.  Given that the "Real" is, in part,
    the brute, inscrutable core of existence, the "Real" lesbian
    is in this sense coincident with the "realesbian."  Hence as
    both real/Real, these figures make her "identical with [her]
    existence--self-identical--raw, sudden, and unfettered," but
    impossible to "see, speak or to hear, since in any case
    [she] is always already there."  See Catherine Clement's
    illuminating discussion of the Lacanian "real-impossible" in
    _The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan_, trans. Arthur
    Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 168-
    169.

         ^26^ Wittig, "The Straight Mind," 26.

         ^27^ Kaja Silverman, _Male Subjectivity at the Margins_
    (New York: Routledge, 1992), 381. 

         ^28^ Ibid, p.387.

         ^29^ Ibid, p.383.

         ^30^ Bersani, "Rectum," 217.

         ^31^ Tania Modleski, _Feminism Without Women: Culture
    and Criticism in a 'Postfeminist' Age_ (New York: Routledge,
    1991), 145-158.  I agree with Modleski that Bersani loses
    the sympathy of a feminist reader when he "declines to
    factor in the 'history of male power'" (148).  However,
    though she acknowledges that lesbian sadomasochists'
    arguments must be taken seriously and points to the
    unresolvable contradiction between the acting out of power
    and the presumption of consensuality, I take exception to
    her assertion that the "defining feature of s/m [is] the
    infliction of pain and humiliation by one individual on
    another" (154).  As her own discussion indicates, the s/m
    relationship resists that definition.  I have taken up these
    questions at length elsewhere.  What is important to point
    out here is that Modleski subtly posits the same distinction
    between "the feminist" reader and the "lesbian" that
    Silverman holds.  The former is a heterosexually-gendered
    subject, the latter is something like an "exception" to the
    feminist "rule."  Thus, once again, the "lesbian" becomes
    that (constitutive) "outside" that facilitates "the
    feminist" argument. 

         ^32^ Bersani, "Rectum," p. 216.

         ^33^ D.A. Miller, "Anal Rope," _Inside/Out: Lesbian
    Theories, Gay Theories_, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and
    London: Routledge, 1991), 135.

         ^34^ Butler, p. 138.

         ^35^ Ibid, p. 159.
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