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Gender, Sexuality and the Theory of Seduction

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Gender, Sexuality and the Theory of Seduction J O H N F L E T C H E R .................................................................................................................................................. Gender, Sexuality and the Theory of Seduction o readdress the conjunction of psychoanalysis and gender one must first pose the question as to whether psychoanalysis is, or has, or can be expected to Tprovide, a theory of gender as such. For it was in something like that hope that certain forms of feminism and radical social theory turned to psycho- analysis in the 1970s. Is gender, however, a properly psychoanalytic or metapsychological category? Or, rather, does not psychoanalysis borrow the categories of masculine and feminine from the life-world of social practice and its ideologies, even at times from the theories of sociology, just as it purloins certain theoretical concepts and categories of biology and physi- ology with their accounts of the body and its functions of self-preservation? However, psychoanalysis borrows and purloins understandings of both gender and the body in order to give an account of something else: something that indeed bears on how we live subjectively our gendered and embodied lives, although this cannot make of psychoanalysis a substitute for an explanation of the social production of gender categories and gendered positions within the various fields of social practice, anymore than psycho- analysis can be a substitute for a science of the body and its developmental and self-preservative functioning. This something else is the unconscious and sexuality, the object of psychoanalysis. I want provisionally to hold apart, to separate at least analytically gender, sexuality and sexual difference, in order to interrupt the too easy assimilation ............................................................................................................................................................................. Women: a cultural review Vol. 11. No. 1/2. ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals 96 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW .................................................................................................................................................. of sexuality and the sexual into the question of sexual difference, male and female on the one hand, and the equally common and too ready assimilation of that sexual difference into the question of gender on the other. As the analyses of Judith Butler in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter have demonstrated, even the distinction between sex and genderÐa pregiven biological sex and a socially constructed and contestable genderÐwhich the interventions of feminist theory since the 1970s have made virtually hegemonic within progressive intellectual and academic culture, tends to lock the question of sexuality into the implicit reproductive and heterosexual teleology within which these termsÐsex and genderÐremain themselves held. This double assumption or assimilation so common in the wider culture is also frequently repeated, albeit unwittingly, within radical theories that seek to interrogate and contest cultural norms; and they are also repeated within different schools of a psychoanalysis that had itself begun, as in the famous opening passage of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality of 1905, to distinguish sexuality as both drive and fantasy from the culturally normative assumptions and prescriptions of reproductive func- tioning. Freud shows us how the sexual drives (Triebe and not Instinkte) `lean on’Ðfrom anlehnen anÐthe instinctual bodily functions of feeding, defeca- tion and procreation, miming them derivatively, only to deviate and swerve from their functioning, their functionality, in the auto-erotic and anxiety- binding activities of fantasy. So, for example, the oral drive repeats derivatively the fixed instinctual feeding sequence of the human infant, borrowing it in the absence of need and of its pregiven object, the mother’s milk, to elaborate its own pleasure-driven and dread-filled scenarios: scenarios which operate through the metaphoric extension of feeding into fantasies of an omnivorous devouring and incorporation of the breast, the mother and beyond that an extended metonymic sequence of infinitely substitutable objects, that act as the support of those fantasies. Fantasy, especially in its unconscious forms, might be understood as also leaning, propping itself anaclitically, not just on the body and its functions, but also on the lived social norms of masculinity and femininity, definitions which it borrows so as to elaborate its own repetitions and inventions. Unconscious fantasy might be said to trope on or to travesty the gendered languages and imagery it finds to hand, as it performs its own psychical work of translation, binding and exclusion. What is so hard to grasp are the precarious convergences and unstoppable divergences between three different dimen- sions: the social norms of gender, the functioning of the body, the operations of unconscious fantasy. The terms `masculine’ and `feminine’ slip deceptively across all three registers with the misleading suggestion of a continuity between the three, a continuity in which any one order can be called on to ground, to consolidate or to perform functions for the insufficiencies of the GENDER, SEXUALITY AND THE THEORY OF SEDUCTION . 97 .................................................................................................................................................. others. Social norms and bodily processes are not, of course, reducible to the play of unconscious identifications and sexual fantasiesÐidentifications and fantasies which, nevertheless, invade both norms and bodies at every point, sustaining or disrupting their functioning. Consequently a demand is often made on psychoanalytic theory to account for the compelling and indeed compulsive internalizing and reproduction of cultural norms, not least those of gender. Their oppressive, even self-defeating operation is felt to `lean’ back, as it were, on fantasy and the psychical in their very exorbitance and persistence. It is on an impasse around this demand that I want to touch. Phallocentrism and Its Double-bind The impasse is that of phallocentrismÐthe centrality of the phallus and castrationÐboth in much psychoanalytic theory and in the human sexual order that it postulates. The feminist philosopher-psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray has proposed, in the words of Margaret Whitford, that the order of discourse in the west, its rationality and epistemology, are supported by an imaginary that is in effect governed unconsciously by one of `the sexual theories of children’, the phantasy that there is only 1 M. Whitford, `Rereading Irigaray’, in one sex, that that sex is male, and that therefore women are really men, in 1 Teresa Brennan (ed.), a defective, `castrated’ version. Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, London: So, two genders but only one sex, in the traumatized vision of the phallic- Routledge, 1989, p. 120. stage little boy, according to Freud, but also in the imaginary of at least 2 J. Mitchell, `Introduc- tion I’, in J. Mitchell western patriarchy, according to Irigaray. This has been explained in the and J. Rose (eds), words of Juliet Mitchell: `To Freud, if psychoanalysis is phallocentric, it is Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the because the human social order that it perceives refracted through the EÂ cole Freudienne, individual human subject is patrocentric.’2 The initial plausibility of thisÐa London: Macmillan, 1982, p. 23. repertoire of fantasies, of the phallus and castration explained by reference to 3 `Patriarchy can only be a patrilineal order of kinship and its taboos on incestÐdoesn’t, however, the effect of a extend far beyond the social relations of traditional patriarchies. It is not at particular arrangement of competing all clear that in late capitalist societies the systematic inequalities between discourses, not an men and women, the feminization of poverty, the structural marginalization expressive totality that of women can be explained by a single central mechanism, such as the law of guarantees its own interests’: J. Copjec, the father, the exchange of women or exogamy and the incest taboo. As `The Anxiety of the feminists from Joan Copjec to Rosemary Pringle have argued, the over- Influencing Machine’, October 23, winter totalizing ambitions of a term like `patriarchy’Ðespecially when it is 1982, 58; R. Pringle, disconnected from the actual social powers and legal authority of fathersÐ `Rethinking Patriarchy’, in Barbara Caine and cannot really explain the gendered forms of power and subordination across R. Pringle (eds), a diverse range of social practices.3 By the same token, if the imaginary Transitions, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, repertoire of late capitalist, so called `postmodern’ societies remains phallo- 1995. centric, then appeals to anthropological accounts of the functioning of the 98 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW .................................................................................................................................................. earlier kinship systems of tribal cultures is not going to help us much with an explanation. The publication in English in 1982 of a series of Lacanian texts, under the title of Feminine Sexuality, translated by Jacqueline Rose and co-edited with Juliet Mitchell, marked a decisive re-posing of the relations between the psychic, the social and the
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