Conrad and Masculinity

Vision, Power and Homosocial Exchange 171
A theoretical distinction needs to be made ... between the relations
between any human subject, any drive or desire, and any instance
of representation, on the one hand, and the points at which (and
the ways in which) sexual difference is inscribed and constructed
across these relations on the other. This distinction hinges fundamentally
on a further distinction between Symbolic castration, and
the place of castration within the Symbolic specification of sexual
difference. Symbolic castration is marked by a splitting of the
subject and by the radical lack of any object for any drive. It is
something to which both men and women are subject. However,
the Symbolic in addition marks lack and castration as distinct for
male and female in its specification of sexual difference. Here, the
female comes to signify castration and lack vis-à-vis the male.
(SD, 129)
I have certain reservations about this general concept of Symbolic
castration, to which I shall return. Given, however, the prevalence
and productivity of the concept in much film theory, its implications
are worth following through. Neale points out that Mulvey’s account,
which attends only to the association of the female with castration,
thereby identifies men as wholly controllers of the look, ignoring
cross-gender identification via fantasy. He argues that ‘the logic of a
fantasy scenario can produce “male” characters in “female” positions
and vice versa, cutting across the distribution of gender identity
constructed at other levels and in other ways by the cinematic text’
(SD, 126). His complication of Mulvey’s model draws on the questioning
of gender essentialism by gay and lesbian theory and provides
a valuable way of analysing the complexities and ambiguities present
in Conrad’s construction of gender. Neale notes that the male body as
well as the female body can be fetishized, but according to different
conventions: ‘the male body can be fetishised ... inasmuch as it signifies
masculinity, and, hence, possession of the phallus, the absence of
lack’. On the other hand, the male body can also ‘function as the
object of voyeuristic looking’, that is, it can signify castration and
lack, but only if it is ‘marked’, whether by disfigurement, or racial or
cultural otherness. (SD, 130). This paradoxical set of possibilities, in
which the male body can signify either castration or its absence, and
in which male and female roles may be exchanged in fantasy, illuminates
some of the instabilities in Conrad’s representation of
masculinity. ‘Marking’ in the form of racial or cultural ‘otherness’ is
illustrated by Kaja Silverman in her discussion of the presentation of