Lesbian Phallus Judith Butler Analysis

Judith Butler argues in The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary that the material and the discursive are not independent. With references to Freud, Kristeva, and Lacan’s writings, Butler refers to the lesbian phallus as a “useful fiction” because it dissociates the phallus from the penis in a way that reaffirms but also displaces its signifying power, destabilizing the heterosexual matrix. On the other hand, Josephine Ho explains the phallus in Embodying Gender as something which is “not part of the self” and in need “to get rid of it”. Ho illustrates the contradictions and difficulties faced by trans-genders in their construction of the ‘self-identity’, and how the body is shaped with the image of self through modification of their bodies. Ho references how the trans-genders of Taiwan are

constructing their ‘self-identity’ in ways that challenge the traditional socially accepted attributes of sexuality through its absence of the necessity to “involve” sexual organs. The importance of a penis for enforcing masculinity is not absent. Here, we see transformations in the desirability status of the phallus symbol which conflicts Lacan’s Mirror Stage theory formative of the "I" function - the ego. Prior to this stage a child is not a subject but one being caught in imaginary relations (e.g. attachment to the mother). The child then starts to realise the desire of the mother and finds a degree of certainty and jubilation in the image reflected back at him/her even though there is a degree of illusion to image. There is an underlying phallus in this image through the desire of the mother, which explains Lacan’s assertion that "man's desire is the Other's desire".

And this identification of the “ideal I” and the ego’s unity begins to change in this symbolic realm and society. In other words, Butler is against self-identity as mere identification through imaginary contours while Ho cites that the mirror is not the object used by trans-genders to identify themselves. The lesbian phallus thus works precisely where it is not the distinction between appearance and reality that must be clarified but the difference within appearance that needs to be manifested. The phallus is also never securely possessed and its potential absence (based on its actual inexistence) is the source of a perpetual anxiety. We may also relook at Butler’s positing of the lesbian phallus and say that the lesbian phallus does not simply parody what doesn’t exist (the phallus). It can also represent the difference between the way things like the phallus seem to us (in fantasy) and the way they really seem to us (in a reality that is only supportable, only bearable, when shot through with

fantasies).