Giorgione - The Sleeping VenusSigmund Freud's famous essay, "Female Sexuality", silly as it seems now, is still interesting when seen as a stage in the development of Gender Theory. Here I summarize some of the core essays in this chain - keeping my personal opinions to a minimum, because otherwise I would come off sounding rude.
In Freud's essay, the central question is - how does the female come to achieve the situation of the Oedipus complex? Like the boy, her first love-object is her mother, but at some stage she shifts her sexual alliance to her father.
Of course, what is problematic with this model is that it suggests that lesbian or bisexual women are merely “underdeveloped”, as they would have never undergone this original shift: “women [who] remain arrested in their original attachment to their mother and never achieve a true change-over towards men” (p. 22). The mature girl has also shifted her interest in her clitoris to her vagina.
The original attachment to the mother is as intense as the later attachment to the father. Although he admits that psychoanalysts have “long given up any expectation of a neat parallelism between male and female sexual development” (p. 22), he speaks in terms of the “normal positive Oedipus situation” of the male, which the female only achieves after going through a “negative complex”. This “negative complex” stage is the root of hysteria, he claims (the word etymologically derives from the Greek for “uterus”).
Freud suggests that women are more prone to adult bisexuality (Freud believes that all human beings are innately bisexual, but that they are socialised from an early age into heterosexuality) because they have two sexual zones: the vagina which is feminine and the clitoris which is masculine (it was never really clear what he meant by this) .
Whereas, in the male, his Oedipal stage is eventually terminated by the fear of castration; the female already regards herself as castrated and this prompts the female Oedipal stage (only after she initially rejects her sexuality entirely, then attempts to appropriate masculinity by choosing a homosexual love-object). Freud claims that many females are incompletely sexualised, since this process is so lengthy and oblique.
He then discusses the conflict between daughter and mother, which he claims originates in the mother’s role in preventing the child from masturbating or, later, finding a sexual partner; and also because the daughter regards her mother as castrated like herself, and therefore reviles all “femaleness”. Furthermore, the mother is blamed for giving the daughter an “insufficient penis” and for weaning her too soon. There is a powerful ambivalence in the emotions toward the mother, and unlike the boy, the negative feelings cannot be displaced onto the father. Therefore the attachment to the mother is destroyed for the female.
So ... that was the prevailing view on female sexuality at the turn of the century. No wonder so many women ended up insane.
Luce Irigaray, a few decades later, in her groundbreaking essay "This Sex Which is Not One", elaborates on Freud’s “2-sex” classification (masculine clitoris, feminine vagina). In her theory, woman’s genitals are multiple; the woman’s sexuality, in fact, is plural. The woman can masturbate passively (her genitals touch “themselves”). Female sexuality is touch-orientated, and shifting, and all-embracing.
The dilemma for women is that Western society is regulated by the masculine, which recognises only the singularity of the phallus as the true sexual organ. The female does indeed, as Freud described, attempt to appropriate that phallus for herself (through subservience to a male love-object).
The multiplicity of female genitalia is disrupted by intercourse with the man, which is an “intrusion” (p. 262) which separates the lips of the vulva and prevents their autoerotic touch. The vagina is therefore reduced to “one-ness” by the phallus; it becomes merely the sheath that “take[s] over from the little boy’s hand” when his masturbation becomes socially prohibited – it is thereby, in fact, less than one – it is nothing, a hole.
Woman, in the phallocentric dominant social imagination, therefore acts only as “a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies” (p. 262). The female tactile desire is subordinated by the male visual desire – and women are forced into a position where they must exhibit their bodies, but hide and efface their genitals (which terrify the phallus).
The pleasure that the woman takes in the incomplete form of her genitals must be hidden because it does not satisfy the “phallomorphism” of our society.
The child, in this schema, becomes the replacement for her repressed sexuality. She is denied the ability to touch herself, or to touch the man (“in a culture in which sexual relations are impracticable because man’s desire and woman’s are strangers to each other” p. 264), and therefore fondles her child.
But this strategy is regressive; it reduces the woman and man to “mother” and “father” and rekindles the Oedipal struggle. The dilemma remains: how does the woman remove herself from the social mechanisms which reduce her to a commodity in exchange between men, without renouncing all of their heterosexual pleasure, and thereby cloistering herself?
Another controversial critique of Freud came from practicing psychoanalysist Joan Riviere. The starting point for her most famous essay, "Womanliness as Masquerade" is a work by Ernest Jones called “The Early Development of Female Sexuality” (1927), in which he argues against Freud’s insistence that the phallus is the primary sexual organ of both sexes. Jones was particularly interested in homosexual women; which he categorizes into two types. One of the types of homosexual woman, which Riviere picks up as the basis of her own essay, is the woman who behaves heterosexually, but is in fact strongly masculine in her identity. Femininity, Riviere claims, is for these women a masquerade to avoid incurring the displeasure and violence of men.
Another controversial critique of Freud came from practicing psychoanalysist Joan Riviere. The starting point for her most famous essay, "Womanliness as Masquerade" is a work by Ernest Jones called “The Early Development of Female Sexuality” (1927), in which he argues against Freud’s insistence that the phallus is the primary sexual organ of both sexes. Jones was particularly interested in homosexual women; which he categorizes into two types. One of the types of homosexual woman, which Riviere picks up as the basis of her own essay, is the woman who behaves heterosexually, but is in fact strongly masculine in her identity. Femininity, Riviere claims, is for these women a masquerade to avoid incurring the displeasure and violence of men.
Her schema is based upon a basic assumption of Psychoanalysis that all people are born as bisexuals, and that hetero- or homo-sexuality is achieved through the resolution of a series of conflicts that develop during early childhood. Another psychoanalyst, Ferenczi, claimed that the subconscious recognition of inherent bisexuality causes anxiety, and that some men therefore exaggerate their masculinity as a “defense” against their homosexuality. Riviere’s woman, an intellectual who displays strong feminine traits to mask her desire to be masculine, is a kind of corollary of Ferenczi’s man.
At the time she was writing (1929) the female intellectual was a fairly new phenomenon. These women were often compelled to excel at both “masculine” traits (intellectual ability) and “feminine” traits (to be a good mother and lover etc.).
She introduces an example of a patient of hers that was of this type. This woman required constant reassurance of her feminine attractiveness from father-figure-type men whenever she had demonstrated her excellence in her “masculine” career. During psychoanalysis, Riviere uncovered a strong sense of sexual rivalry with both her mother and her father – indicating that the innate infant bisexuality had never been effectively resolved into clear heterosexuality. Her need to “castrate” her father (steal his power, and render him unthreatening) resulted in her choosing to excel in a “masculine” career, which afforded her a sense of superiority over men. However, fearing the father’s symbolic retribution, she warded off his displeasure by appealing to the father (who was embodied by various father-figure-type men) with her feminine sexuality. This allowed her to appear innocent of the castration; Riviere argues that her femininity was a ruse to hide the fact that she possessed the phallus (masculine power).
Riviere argues that the masquerade of womanliness is itself “true” womanliness, as gender is performative rather than innate (as J. Butler later argues). However, for this woman, womanliness was a method to avoid anxiety rather than a sincere source of sexual pleasure. In fact, although this woman enjoyed sex to full orgasm, her enjoyment was a mask of the (male) fear of impotence. She was essentially frigid (i.e. castrated, and longing to castrate) and therefore needed to be loved by men in order to restore her sense of self-worth. Riviere suggests that this woman was innately a homosexual (she fantasized about women, and even identified with her husband when he had an affair).
Riviere cites other behaviors that can characterize this type of woman: technically competent women who pretend to be incompetent, intellectuals who dismiss their own subjects when talking to colleagues (telling jokes etc.).
Riviere suggests that the desire to identify with men arises from an intense rivalry with other women (bordering on sadism). Based upon Melanie Klein’s models of female psychosexual development, she claims that this rivalry results from an unresolved conflict of the Oral phase, in which the mother is seen to withhold the nipple. This anxiety/sadism against the nipple is displaced to a castrative desire, and the desire to become the phallus (in practice, to become masculine) in order to placate the mother. However, the woman feels helpless, as she believes that both father and mother possess the phallus and withhold it from her, and her rage prompts her to create a phantasy of non-lack (by attempting to acquire respect for her masculinity, and thereby to claim to possess the phallus), and must also hide the fact that she believes she has castrated her father/mother.
Furthermore, the woman will deny the existence of the mother (as source of the nipple-sadistic anxiety) entirely in order to avoid that unresolved anxiety. Relations with women are therefore subordinated, and the woman becomes obsessed with how she is viewed by men. In this way, Riviere suggests, the homosexuality of the woman is displaced.
Riviere closes with the question of “what is das ewig Weibliche?”; what is the nature of “true” femininity, or femininity that exists “behind” the mask? She cites Ernest Jones and Helene Deutsch who claim that female heterosexuality develops during the Oral phase, and teaches women to find gratification in incorporation. All of the other apparent qualities of femininity, Riviere argues, are merely reaction-formations that develop out of anxiety, and are not a true source of pleasure for the woman. When women come to accept castration (and concurrently become passive, humble beings, she claims) they are attempting to atone for their desires to castrate. This is true, Riviere argues, of both heterosexual and homosexual women.
In the 1990s the Freudian theory got another makeover in the form of Judith Butler.
In her essay, "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire", she insists that feminist theory does not merely reverse the paradigm of gender generalization and create a homogenous enemy in the “colonizing” male. She talks about the need to consider different sites of oppression “horizontally” rather than hierarchically, so as to avoid the “tactic of masculinist signifying economies” (p. 309) of subordinating certain discourses below others.
Certain theorists have argued that feminism effaces the multiplicity of identity (and oppression) by universalizing the category “woman”, ignoring race, class, culture and other dimensions of personhood. They claim that this is “normative and exclusionary” (p. 309), and in fact serves to disable critiques of these oppressions. A response to these critiques has been the attempts at a “coalitional politics” of feminism. Butler, however, is skeptical, her concern being that the perceived need for unity (as a strategic necessity) would not allow for true democracy that allows multiplicity, remains open to contestation, and does not coerce all parties into a particular (class and culture-based) conception of successful dialogue.
Butler argues that coalitions based upon “identity” are doomed to become oppressive; since when identity becomes a linguistic issue it institutionalizes “a definition that forecloses in advance the emergence of new identity concepts”. Instead, Butler claims that provisional coalitions should form around particular concrete practices, which will allow those whose interests are implicated in those practices to remain free of artificial, oppressive identities for the sake of political action.
The notion of “identity” as an objective, stable and universal experience is contested. The notion of “identity” is a keystone for the definition of the “person” that is so essential in our social discourses, and it presumes that personhood is a diachronic category (the person remains “self-identical” over time). Butler, using a Foucaultian paradigm, argues that the linguistic concept of identity constructs our experience of reality rather than neutrally describes it. This is particularly true in the case of gender, which is a highly regulated feature of social/personal life. Those who transgress the nominal regulative categories of gender/sex (LGBTs, “masculine women” and “feminine men” etc.) are therefore “unintelligible”. The binary and unequal categories of “male” and “female” are required for the “heterosexualization of desire” (p. 312) and do not allow for the existence of “identities” that subvert naturalized gender/sexual ones. Modern movements to have these subversive categories recognized therefore provide an opportunity for the concept of “identity” to be questioned (and thereby the possibilities for these marginal/transgressive experiences to proliferate).
Butler then discusses the theories of three theorists of poststructural gender oppressiveness: Foucault, Irigaray and Wittig. She attempts a reconciliation between their differing theories of how sexual categorization derives from power. Irigaray claims that there is only one sex in language – the male – and that woman in this system is unrepresentable (they are not even the Other of the male subject, they are merely the “relation of difference” in a language of binaries in which there is only the male, and woman is entirely silenced). Foucault suggests that there is a potential multiplicity of sexes, but that they are reduced to a binary in order to suppress any position that disrupts the “heterosexual, reproductive and medicojuridical hegemonies” (p. 314). Wittig, finally, believes that only woman is a sexed/gendered being in our language system (while man alone is a “person”), and that this is oppressive. She claims that only the lesbian could overthrow the male-female binary and restore true humanism (in which everyone is a “person”), since the concept of sex does not apply to the lesbian as it does to relationships/identities involving men.
Wittig’s position falls prey to the fallacy of “the metaphysics of substance”, in which concepts that are created by the grammar of language are falsely believed to be prelinguistic attributes of being (i.e. a set of individual psychic impressions are organized by language into a fictitious unity, which is believed to be substantive). Gender is, as Wittig elsewhere concurs, particularly problematic since it is created by language. Language presumes that gender is substantive, and also that it is an aspect of “identity” (one can “be” a woman or a man, as one can “be” heterosexual etc.). The male-female binary is presumed to operate by différance (one is a man only if one is not a woman), and the structure presumes that (heterosexual) desire follows causally from (masculine-feminine) gender, which follows causally from (male-female) sex. However, Butler claims that in reality there is no core “being” primary to one’s performances. Sexual identity does not cause one’s actions; it is defined by them.
Finally, Butler investigates whether gender, as well as the restriction of sexual practice into “hetero-” “homo-” or “bisexual” that it achieves, can be subverted. This can not be achieved, she argues, by identifying a sexual position (e.g. homosexuality) that is already constituted by the regulations of language. Rather, a recognition of the constructedness of identity (which does not render it false) should allow for a politics of gender that allows for the fact that gender is an ongoing discursive practice, and that identity is continually reconstructed.
