Bitch and Femme Psychology: Women, Aggression, and Psychoanalytic Social Theory

There are different kinds of feminists, drawn to the movement for a range of personal reasons. For some, it is the maternal side of female social bonds, the warm conviviality of women's gatherings. For me it was solidarity with other women who, as girls, got into trouble for talking back. In my family, the punishment for talking back was having your mouth washed out with soap. It was not for many years that I recognized the exquisite logic operating here, how the punishment perfectly conformed to the crime. With spanking, the ritual centered on a humiliating and controlled exercise of pure submission. I remember very few spankings. With the soap punishment, aggression on both sides—on that of the victim as well as that of the torturer—was permitted. It is quite difficult to force a slippery object into the mouth of a resistant child, so this ritual could easily fall apart midway through the procedure. More importantly, resistance was expected. The victim could scream and writhe when that half-gelatinous bar of Ivory was forcefully crammed inside her mouth, glazing her teeth. She could spit to rid herself of the horrible bitterness, without this act of defiant indignation being viewed as an invitation for more punishment.

In looking back, I can see how this punishment operated within the social symbolic order of bourgeois womanhood—with maternal aggression expressed within a framework of maintaining domestic hygiene. But I also came to view it in terms of what classical psychoanalysts call “oral rage.” Just as Victorians created highly sexualized subjects through their obsessive preoccupation with control over the body, as Foucault so famously argues, mothers like mine may have created girls with dirty mouths.

These were also moments of enacting the perverse strains in mother/daughter relationships. The thrusting of an unwelcome object into a body orifice was part of a larger world of intimate invasions, a sense of perpetual vulnerability to being penetrated by an Othe