Edited by Moe Meyer - Get a Free Blog

THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 121
ideologically bound female subject position to a more promising and,
therefore, more encouraging feminist subject. She locates the subject of feminism
in the micro-political practices and cultural productions of feminism,
characterizing it as existing both inside and outside of gender as ideological
representation in that this subject moves between two contradictory spaces. De
Lauretis explains:
It is a movement between the (represented) discursive space of the
positions made available by hegemonic discourses and the space-off, the
elsewhere, of those discourses: those other spaces both discursive and
social that exist, since feminist practices have (re)constructed them, in the
margins (or “between the lines,” or “against the grain”) of hegemonic
discourses and in the interstices of institutions, in counter-practices and
new forms of community. (1987:26)
De Lauretis locates the feminist subject in this “elsewhere,” engendered there in
the tension created by the condition of inhabiting the two kinds of spaces at
once, conscious of the pull in contrary directions.
The female subject, on the other hand, is trapped in hegemonic discourses as
“woman,” the always already spoken-for construction that replaces women as
speaking subjects in representation. This construction is anathema to women as
historical beings and social subjects because it signifies a (feminine) essence
intrinsic to all women, thereby reducing them to “nature,” “mother,” and
ultimately, the object of (male) desire. “Woman” replaces women and marks
their absence. In this configuration, the lesbian is doubly missing in that even her
absence is not inscribed. This is both her oppression and her promise as a
destabilizing force.
De Lauretis not only distinguishes between the female subject and the subject
of feminism. She identifies the female subject position as inescapably trapped in
the phallocentric contract of heterosexuality. Borrowing Irigaray’s notion of hom
(m)osexuality as the term of sexual (in)difference, that is, the term that signifies
a single practice and representation of the sexual as male, De Lauretis identifies
hom(m)osexuality as, in fact, the term of heterosexuality (1988:156). So that
when she states that in order to begin the process of change “we must walk out
of the male-centered frame of reference in which gender and sexuality are (re)
produced by the discourse of male sexuality,” she means that, at the level of
discourse, we must walk out of the hom(m)osexual frame and its phallocratic
contract, the heterosexual contract (1987:17).
In a brilliant theoretical maneuver, Case recuperates the lesbian butch
suppressed historically by the feminist movement, reassimilates recent feminist
theoretical strategies, and maps the butch-femme subject position—one that
provides, in her words, “a ground that could resolve the project of constructing
the feminist subject position” (1989: 289). In other words, a position outside the
heterosexual contract.