Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 84.
… a feminist theory of knowledge that insists that the knower is sexed cannot then argue that the feminist knower does not have a sex. To do so is to reinstitute the universal knowing subject which feminist epistemology compellingly critiques.
The relation between the female subject and feminist knower therefore remains a crucial issue for feminist theories of knowledge. However, existing theories consider this issue in terms of foundational concepts of knower that fix it in already given terms. These theories begin their analysis with a concept of the knower that substantiates it as a sexed knower or as a political subject. This approach mires feminist epistemology in a series of circular debates concerning female/feminist subjects, which oscillate between arguments for and against which subject can serve as the better foundation for feminist knowledges. However, these debates do not actually put those foundational terms into question, and fail to consider the production of those subjects. They assume a given sexual identity (the female knower) and a given political identity (the feminist knower) so that these models do not explain the constitution of the feminist knower. Rather than assuming the prior existence of sexed knower or the political subject, we need to explain their formation. Moreover, we need to explain the relationship between these subjects. To evade the circularity of existing debates, I begin with an analysis of the relation between the formation of the sexed female subject, and the constitution of the knower as feminist subject.
Reading femininity How do we become sexed subjects?
Butler argues that ‘psychoanalysis has a crucial role to play in any theory of the subject’ (2000b: 140). Feminists theorizing subjectivity have predominantly read Lacanian theory as and for an account of the constitution of ‘femininity’. Those engagements with Lacan’s work focus upon his account of the operation of the phallic signifier in relation to the ‘feminine’ subject and sexuality, particularly upon the theory of sexual difference presented in Alan Sheridan’s translation of Écrits.
In this classical Lacanian theory, sexed subjectivity is assumed in relation to the phallic signifier. Masculine subjects are defined by having the phallus and feminine subjects by being the phallus (É: 320). When subjectivity is assumed in the Symbolic order, the masculine or feminine subject is sexually differentiated in its relation to the phallus. In this account, the speaking subject is always a sexed subject defined by the phallic signifier of the Symbolic order, whether it is the masculine subject that has the phallus or the feminine subject that is the phallus. For both sexes, sexuation pivots on the phallus.
Two readings dominate the anglophone feminist reading of the classical Lacanian theory of femininity. The first response, which Nancy Fraser (1992) exemplifies, refuses Lacan’s account as hopelessly and irrevocably phallocentric. The second response, which Ellie Ragland-Sullivan (1987) exemplifies, is a sympathetic interpretation of Lacanian theory that argues that it provides a compelling description of the difficulty of phallic femininity. However, these debates continually return to the problem of sexual difference that constructs femininity as either phallic or Other to the phallus, thereby defining femininity in relation to the phallus.
Moreover, neither of these readings offers a theory of the female/feminist knower because they do not unpack the relationship between these two identities. Such a theory requires a closer examination of the formation of ‘feminine’ subjectivity. It cannot reduce the feminist knower to either her ‘femininity’ or her ‘sexuality’, because it needs to address her political as well as subjective formation. In other words, it must address the distinction ‘between different notions of political identity – between the idea of a political identity for feminism (what women require) and that of a feminine identity for women (what women are or should be)’ (Rose 1986: 103).
How then is it possible to provide a psychoanalytic account of these two identities that is ‘beyond the phallus’? One way is to explore another reading of Lacan.
The feminist reception of Lacan has been based on the ‘classical’ Lacanian account of the sexed subject presented in Écrits, rather than his later seminars of the 1970s. The focus of Anglo-American feminist theory upon Écrits may be attributable to the delay in the publication and translation of Lacan’s later work on femininity, in particular his seminar Encore (1972– 1973) (S20).
Encore was not published until 1975 and, with the exception of two chapters that Jacqueline Rose translates in Feminine Sexuality (1982), remained untranslated until 1998. Lacan’s later work proposes a more complex account of the production of the female subject that avoids the phallocentric circularity of his classical theory of sexed subjectivity. In the next section, I examine the later Lacanian concept of the sexed subject in Encore, developing and redeploying it as a feminist theory of the formation of the female subject and its ‘feminine’ sexuation. (85)