Recuperating the Flaccid Phallus: The Hysteria of Post-Oedipal Masculine Representation and the Return of the Anal Father

Women's movements since the early '60s, along with the various feminist ideologies that they spawned, from the most conservative (e.g., “real women”) to the most radical (e.g., radical and trans-gendered feminism), have certainly placed masculinity into a state of crisis. Crisis, perhaps is not the most advantageous word to use here, since masculinity, like femininity, is a concept that has only adventitious relations to biological sex; its various manifestations collectively constitute cultural, social, and psychosexual expressions of gender. Feminized masculinity and masculinized femininity are ultimately cultural achievements: recall Freud's claim that the polymorphous sexuality of the child has to be marked, mapped, and written on the body as it passes through the structures of Oedipalization. For Lacan, “sex” itself belongs to the psychic register of the Real—that is, to a place beyond language—because language “fails” in its attempt to articulate it once and for all. “Sex” constitutes a primary fantasy of identification that can only resolve itself “performatively,” to use the more contemporary language of Judith Butler, through the defiles of the signifier in their positive (hetero) and (sic) negative (homo) forms of Oedipalization. Consequently, there will always be “gender trouble.” In brief, the sex/gender of masculinity, like femininity, as enthnographers and anthropologists make transculturally evident, is some-“thing” to be acquired, achieved and initiated into, and this often involves painful mutilation and humiliating rituals.

The question remains open, however, why the Western myth of Oedipalization and its accompanying kinship structure must install the transcendental signifier of the phallus as the object of desire to make up for the fallible ontological lack each of us must face when we become enculturated into society. The phallus (⊘) insures that the paternal principle of the Law—a Law based on the exchange of women—and t