Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

LACAN AND IRIGARAY: ETHICAL LACK AND ETHICAL PRESENCE 99
Ellis’ ‘science’ of sex constitutes above all an apology for and justification of
precisely that form of male sexuality which contemporary feminists were
challenging: a sexuality based on ‘uncontrollable urges’, power and violence.
By claiming that this form of male sexuality was biologically determined, and
therefore inevitable, the feminist challenge was undermined and male
domination legitimated (1984a, p. 53).
We could substitute “Lacan” for “Ellis” to see what this new French sexology
corresponds to, and how it responds to our contemporary feminist campaigns against
sexism in the media and in language, and writings on feminine pleasure. Lacan tells
us that women are biologically incapable of representing the phallus, are eternally
secondary citizens in the symbolic order, and can only come through the phallus.
Heterosexuality remains natural and institutionalized in the theories of both Ellis and
Lacan. Neither were amused by female autonomy. In discussing the body-image,
Lacan asserts:
All the phenomenon we are discussing seem to exhibit the laws of gestalt: the
fact that the penis is dominant in the shaping of the body-image is evidence of
this. Though this may shock the champions of the autonomy of female
sexuality, such dominance is a fact and one moreover which cannot be put
down to cultural influences alone (Lacan: 1953, p. 13).
The phallus as original signifier is constructed on the belief in the nothing of
women’s sex. Lacanian psychoanalysis is the theory that women must do what men
want and be silent. His domination is biologically and symbolically determined by
his socio-linguistic laws of development. Or as Nietzsche hoped: “The man’s
happiness is: I will. The woman’s happiness is: He will” (1986a, p. 92). Dale
Spender points to a historical feminist awareness of a central masculine fear: the
independence of women and the irrelevance of men (1983, p. 144). In a way that
recalls the fate of feminism under Ellis and his followers, Liz Stanley illustrates how
the work of Foucault and Lacan was taken up in 1980s England as the only sexual
theory. The history of feminist thought and practice is distorted and ridiculed in
order to consolidate a sexual theory purged of feminist politics and independent
women (1984, p. 61). Only feminist accounts which fit in with these projects are
acceptable as sexual theory to the male-stream representatives of the French school.
Stanley charges:
The underlying “project” in all of this seems fairly clear. It is one which
promotes men’s liberationism by taking over “sexual politics” and the right to
define what this is and what analyses of it exist…. It does so partly by using
sexual theory and the parody of “feminism” to drive a wedge between
feminism and a theory of sexual politics. And it does so partly by producing a
construction of “sexual politics” which omits most of what feminism
associates with it, and in particular its analysis of male sexual power and
women’s oppression (1984, p. 61).