Reply to Bjorklund and Orbach: Female Sexuality Roundtable

Can women have a subjectivity? Can women desire? Has anything changed?

Well, yes. To wit, this roundtable and its topics, its participants, and its discussants: Although consciousness-raising may have run its course, the conversational tone here would have been impossible without that feminist prehistory. The roundtable's voices speak in the depressive position, mourning opportunities lost while hoping for more change still. Consider Susie Orbach's notice of the stubborn “difficulty of acting in one's own interest, even being able to identify an interest and a desire.” Tormented absences back then, self-interested action and desire may still get away from us on occasion or even often, but their desirability is at least now taken for granted.

At the same time, of course, problems endure. Perhaps they are familiar, or, layers peeled away, more foundational. As women's claim on subjectivity has strengthened, so has the backlash—consider “sexualized visual Muzak,” in Orbach's excellent phrase. Is it possible that, as homosexual desire becomes a more ordinary part of the landscape (think gay marriage), the signification of “woman” becomes even more intensely heterosexual? Perhaps it is not so wise to leave “aside the particular segmentation of lesbian and bi women,” as Orbach suggests. Yet does Ellen DeGeneres actually look butch in those Cover Girl ads? The “pride in our outsiderness” that Bjorklund names doesn't actually find much representation, whether in this roundtable or in media representation.

Of course, the dilemma here is that when the margin is invited into, or makes its way into, the center, it becomes centrist,

and a new margin is created. Think about that great tongue-in-cheek Vanity Fair cover in 1993 that portrayed a Playboy Bunny–suited Cindy Crawford (reputedly in the closet) shaving a three-piece-suited k.d. lang (most definitely out, though I did see her in a dress in the 1988 video “Roy Orbis