Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. page 108
Feminist discourse
In the Lacanian account of language, the Symbolic order is that which literally orders an undifferentiated Real (É: 71– 72). 2 An effect of that arrangement of signifiers is to ‘cut’ the Real, such that the Symbolic order structures signification of the Real in one way rather than another.
In Lacan’s later reformulation of the discursive operation of the Symbolic order, signification is structured so that it privileges certain discursive operations while excluding others. The Symbolic order delimits discursive operation because it inscribes certain subjects but not others, and certain social relations but not others. 107
However, it is that which the socio-symbolic order does not represent that puts feminism to work.
In many different practices, feminist knowledges attempt to reinscribe the object as subject through the tropes of the ‘impossible’ feminine, the repressed maternal, the refused body, the banished other, a misrecognized difference, an ‘unimaginable’ utopia. As the third-waver Barbara Findlen describes it, feminism has named ‘the problem that had no name’: by the time that I was discovering feminism, naming had become a principle occupation of feminists.
Everywhere you looked feminists were naming things – things like sexual harassment, date rape, displaced homemakers and domestic violence – that used to be called, as Gloria Steinem pointed out, just life. (1995a: xi)
In Lacanian terms, feminist knowledges represent that which the Symbolic order does not represent, and bring into the signifying order that which it previously refused. Applying the Lacanian model, how then might we understand the structure of this discourse? In its most structural and minimal terms, we might say that feminist discourse represents the a, the excluded of discourse. We can represent existing discourse and its relationship to its excluded term like this:
Existing discourse: s-s-s-s-s-s|a
Feminism recognizes that the Other is lacking; that it excludes from its symbolic economy the a. Feminism sets the knower to work, and the product of that work is a new signifier. Feminist knowledges articulate the a and produce a new signifier. 3 This new symbolic element represents that which the signifying chain did not previously articulate, the a:
Feminist discourse: 
Feminist knowledge affirms the existence of this excluded term, in an act that Freud (1925a: 438– 439), and Lacan (S1: 57– 58) following him, describe as a judgment of existence. By such a judgment ‘we symbolically affirm the existence of an entity: existence is here synonymous with symbolization, integration into the symbolic order – only what is symbolized fully “exists” ’ (Zizek 1992: 136). It is possible, then, to describe a feminist act of knowing as an act of symbolization, which articulates the a of discourse in a judgment of existence. This symbolic affirmation gives the a existence, producing a new signifier. 108
In the Lacanian model, the inscription of a new signifier into the signifying chain produces new discourses. Because the differential relation of symbolic elements in the signifying chain produces meaning, its production is contingent upon a particular relationship of signifiers. However, the inscription of the excluded term reorders the relation of those symbolic elements. The insertion of the otherwise excluded term changes the previously closed order of these elements, creating a new discursive structure and so a new signifying chain. In this way, the analysand produces a new discourse and hence new meaning. From this model, it is possible to understand how the feminist articulation of the a can produce a new discourse. In the operation of feminist discourse, the act of knowing inserts a new signifier into the existing structure of symbolic elements, and thus forms a new signifying chain:
taken from page 109
The disruption and rearrangement of the prior signifying order produces a new relation of symbolic elements, and hence a new discourse. This new discourse produces new meaning, and hence a different representation of the world. This new representation of the world provides a new way to understand it. If knowing is a discursive practice, then the production of new discourses permits the creation of new knowledges by which to know the world.
In the 1970s, the feminist movement began to name the sexual violence many women experienced, but which was perceived neither as a political issue nor as being related to gender politics. This naming is the signification of the a of discourse, because it represents a violence against women which had previously not been articulated. The naming of gendered harms produces a signifier of an otherwise unsignified a of social discourses. …, Deirdre Davis argues that ‘[i]n order to address, deconstruct, and eradicate a harm, we must give the harm a name’ (1997: 200). This naming of the a is then inscribed into the signifying chains of social discourses, which produces a new signifying chain, or knowledge, around the issue of gendered harms. In this way, feminism produces new discourses of gendered harms that fundamentally shift the social meaning of sexual violence.