Teresa de Lauretis. “Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies: Femininity and Fetishism in David Cronenberg’s ‘M. Butterfly'” Signs, 24.2 (1999): 303-334.
When, on their way to prison, in the paddy wagon scene, Song, naked at his feet, tries to convince Rene to accept the Butterfly fantasy as a gay fantasy (“under the robes, beneath everything, it was always me…. I am your Butterfly”), Rene rejects him, saying: “I’m a man who loved a woman created by a man. Anything else simply falls short.”‘ He cannot accept Song’s transvestite fantasy of Butterfly, ostensibly because his fantasy is heterosexual; one could say, heterosexist. But what is a woman created by a man if not the masquerade of femininity? Then it is not the revelation of Song’s maleness — which Rene has obviously disavowed, known and not known, all along — that causes him to lose his love object, but the end of the masquerade. With it comes the realization that what he loved was not Song but Butterfly, the masquerade of femininity; that the object of his desire is a fantasy object, Butterfly, and that object alone can sustain his desire. 321
Butterfly, then, is a fetish in the classical, psychic sense defined by Freud: it is an object which wards off the threat of castration always looming above the male subject and allays his fear of homosexuality. It is quite literally an object, the sum of the accoutrements that make up the masquerade of femininity: the oriental woman costume, the long black hair, the face paint and rouge, the long red fingernails – all the props that Rene will barter from the prison guard for his final performance.
But the fetish is a particular object, set in a mise-en-scène and a scenario, a narrative, from which it acquires its psychic value as object and signifier of desire. This is Butterfly, a fantasy object which enables Rene’s desire and the very possibility of existing as a desiring subject, for desire is the condition of psychic existence. 321
The distinction between our two conceptualizations of the Butterfly trope in the film is the distinction between fetish and phallus.
By saying that Song’s Butterfly is the phallus, which must remain veiled, masqueraded (“the veiled thing that is the ‘oriental woman”‘), Chow adheres to the Lacanian definition of woman’s position in desire: she wants to be the phallus, the signifier of the desire of the Other. But what about Song’s desire? Since the Butterfly fantasy is also the scenario of Song’s desire, to equate “Butterfly” with the phallus is to assume that Song’s homosexual desire is from the position of a woman (woman as phallus).
Which is to see homosexuality as sexual and gender inversion, in the old sexological formula that Lacan’s theory raises to a higher level of abstraction.27 Here is where my reading and Chow’s part ways or diverge — on the issue of the nature of desire and the conditions of spectatorial identification.
Not surprisingly, the film elicits in me a very different fantasy. …
[Chow denies or minimizes] the significance of Song’s homosexual desire for Rene, although her identification, unlike theirs, is not with Gallimard but with Song; in other words, Chow’s referring to Song as “she” signals her identification of Song as a woman, but also her identification with Song as a woman. However, if one defines Song as a woman solely on account of gender, without consideration of sexuality and desire, the motivation for his actions and his sexual relationship with Rene can only be a political one: Song is a spy, does what he does for the love of his country, not of Rene — a characterization the film ironizes (most evidently in the two scenes between Song and Comrade Chin) and openly disallows.
Alternatively, Song’s motivation is one of anticolonial resistance and revenge: he just plays the role of Butterfly to turn the orientalist fantasy against its colonial, imperialist creator. In my view, the film also belies this reading, especially (but not only) in the paddy wagon scene after the trial, when Song tries in vain to convince Rene to accept his transvestite fantasy of Butterfly as a gay fantasy. There, when the spying game is all played out, it seems to me beyond doubt that, whatever else he may be, Song is a man who loves a man.