Page 166 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

PHALLOCENTRIC

that is consulted and invoked. This is an appeal to an authority that has no origin
or universal foundations. Indeed, the very practice of citation produces the
authority that is cited and reconstitutes the law. The maintenance of the law is a
matter of re-working a set of already operative conventions and involves iterability, 143
repetition and citationality.
Though Austin originated the idea of a performative in 1962, it was Judith Butler
who popularized the concept of performativity within cultural studies during the
1990s. In particular, Butler conceives of sex and gender in terms of citational
performativity. For Butler, ‘sex’ is produced as a reiteration of hegemonic norms, a
performativity that is always derivative. The ‘assumption’ of sex, which is not a
singular act or event but an iterable practice, is secured through being repeatedly
performed. Thus gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect
the very subject it appears to express.
Butler combines this reworking of discourse and speech act theory with
psychoanalysis to argue that the ‘assumption’ (taking on) of sex involves
identification with the normative phantasm (idealization) of ‘sex’. Sex is a symbolic
subject position assumed under threat of punishment (for example, of symbolic
castration or abjection). The symbolic is a series of normative injunctions that
secure the borders of sex (what shall constitute a sex) through the threat of
psychosis and abjection (an exclusion, throwing out or rejection). Butler goes on to
argue that drag can destabilize and recast gender norms through a re-signification
of the ideals of gender. Through a miming of gender norms, drag can be subversive
to the extent that it reflects on the performative character of gender. Drag suggests
that all gender is performativity and as such destabilizes the claims of hegemonic
heterosexual masculinity as the origin that is imitated. That is, hegemonic
heterosexuality is itself an imitative performance which is forced to repeat its own
idealizations.
Links Discourse, identification, identity, psychoanalysis, sex, speech act

Phallocentric In a general sense, the concept of phallocentric refers to male-centred
discourse or from the perspective of a privileged masculinity. More particularly, the
idea has been deployed in reference to the use of the term Phallus within
psychoanalytic theory where the Phallus is held to be a symbolic transcendental
universal signifier of the source, self-origination and unifying agency of the subject.
This is argued to be especially the case in relation to psychoanalysis as developed
by Lacan.
For its critics, the phallocentric character of psychoanalysis follows from Freud’s
assertion that women would ‘naturally’ see their genitals as inferior in tandem with
the claim that genital heterosexual activity that stresses masculine power and
feminine passivity is the normal form of sexuality. Further, in Lacan’s reworking of
Freud, the Oedipal moment marks the formation of the subject into the Law of the
Father, and thus entry into the symbolic order itself. That is, the power of the
Phallus is understood to be necessary to the very existence of subjects. For Lacan,
the symbolic Phallus: