(Salih, 2002. p 86).
‘The question, of course, is why it is assumed that the phallus requires that particular body part to symbolize, and why it could not operate through symbolizing other body parts’, writes Butler, and she argues that the ‘displaceability’ of the phallus, its ability to symbolize body parts or body-like things other than the penis is what makes the lesbian phallus possible (BTM: 84).
Women can both ‘have’ and ‘be’ the phallus, which means that they can suffer from penis envy and a castration complex at the same time; moreover, since ‘the anatomical part is never commensurable with the phallus itself’, men may be driven by both castration anxiety and penis envy, or rather, ‘phallus envy’ (BTM: 85). The phallus is ‘a transferable phantasm’ (BTM: 86), ‘an imaginary effect’ (BTM: 88), part of an imagined morphology (or a ‘morphological imaginary’) that can be appropriated and made to signify/ symbolize differently.
Such ‘aggressive reterritorializations’ (BTM: 86) deprivilege the phallus as both symbol and signifier, as well as revealing its status within a bodily schema, which, like language, is a resignifiable signifying chain with no ‘transcendental signified’ at its origin. Butler makes the most of this resignifiability in her ascription of the phallus to other body parts:
‘Consider that “having” the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things’, she writes. ‘[T]he simultaneous acts of deprivileging the phallus and removing it from the normative heterosexual form of exchange, and recirculating and reprivileging it between women deploys the phallus to break the signifying chain in which it conventionally operates’ (BTM: 88). Butler claims that the phallus is a ‘plastic’ signifier that may ‘suddenly’ be made to stand for any number of body parts, discursive performatives or alternative fetishes (BTM: 89).
And yet it would appear that the phallus remains somewhat elusive, since Butler does not specify exactly how such resignifications can ‘suddenly’ happen, or why women would want to make their arms, tongues, hands, pelvic bones, etc. into phallic signifiers. The subversive potential of the resignifiable phallus resides in Butler’s insistence that you do not need to have a penis in order to have or be a phallus, and that having a penis does not mean that you will have or be a phallus. ‘[T]he lesbian phallus offers the occasion (a set of occasions) for the phallus to signify differently, and in so signifying, to resignify, unwittingly, its own masculinist and heterosexist privilege’, she writes (BTM: 90).
Again we return to the idea that anatomy is discourse or signification rather than destiny, which means that the body can be resignified in ways that challenge rather than confirm heterosexual hegemony. In her conclusion to the second chapter of Bodies, Butler states that she is not suggesting that a new body part is required, since she has not been talking about the penis as such; instead she calls for the displacement of the symbolic heterosexual hegemony of sexual difference and the release of alternative imaginary schemas of erotogenic pleasure (BTM: 91). It would indeed appear that Butler has wrested this hitherto privileged signifier from Lacan’s discursive control (BTM: 82– 3), and yet the lesbian phallus she ‘offers’ in her description of alternative bodily schemas (BTM: 90) will be equally open to appropriation and resignification by those who do not identify as ‘lesbians’. Indeed, we might well wonder who can ‘have’ and ‘be’ a lesbian phallus that is presumably vulnerable to subversive reterritorialization by men who, among other complexes, may also suffer from ‘lesbian phallus envy’ (Salih, 2002. p 86).
WIELDING THE LESBIAN PHALLUS
The lesbian phallus is not a dildo and it is not something one keeps in one’s desk drawer (see GP: 37). The morphological imaginary is the morph or form the body takes on through imagined or fantasized projections, and Butler’s rewriting of Lacan’s morphological imaginary displaces the phallus from its privileged significatory position. Asserting that penis and phallus are not synonymous, Butler shows how the phallus may be ‘reterritorialized’ by people who do not have penises. This is because the phallus is a symbol of a body part whose absence or ‘vanishing’ it signifies. To disconnect sign (phallus) from referent (penis) in this way allows Butler to displace the privilege Lacan accords this phallic signifier. ‘Of course there’s also a joke in “The Lesbian Phallus” because to have the phallus in Lacan is also to control the signifier’, Butler states in an interview. ‘It is to write and to name, to authorize and to designate. So in some sense I’m wielding the lesbian phallus in offering my critique of the Lacanian framework. It’s a certain model for lesbian authorship. It’s parody’ (GP: 37) (Salih 2002. p 87).