Page 167 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

• Acts as the ‘transcendental signifier’ of the power of the symbolic order.
• Serves to split the subject away from desire for the mother thus enabling subject
formation.
144 • Marks the necessary interruption of the mother–child dyad and the subject’s
entry into the symbolic (without which there is only psychosis).
• Allows the subject to experience itself as a unity by covering over a sense of lack.

For critics such as Irigaray, the centrality of the Phallus within Lacan’s argument
renders ‘woman’ an adjunct term so that the feminine is always repressed and entry
into the symbolic continually tied to the father/Phallus. Indeed, for Irigaray the
whole of Western philosophy is phallocentric so that the very idea of ‘woman’ is
not an essence per se but rather that which is excluded. Here the feminine is
understood to be the unthinkable and the unrepresentable ‘Other’ of phallocentric
discourses.

Links Écriture feminine, feminism, Other, psychoanalysis, sex, subjectivity

Place Since the 1980s cultural studies has shown a growing interest in questions of
space and place influenced in particular by Foucault and his exploration of the
intersections of discourse, space and power. In this context, a place is understood
to be a site or location in space constituted and made meaningful by social relations
of power and marked by identifications or emotional investments. As such, a place
can be understood to be a bounded manifestation of the production of meaning in
space.
The organization of human activities and interactions within space, that is, in
places, is fundamental to social and cultural life. For example, a ‘home’ is divided
into different living spaces – front rooms, kitchens, dining rooms, bedrooms etc.
These spaces are used in diverse ways and are the arena for a range of activities with
different social meanings. Accordingly, bedrooms are intimate spaces into which we
would rarely invite strangers; instead, a front room or parlour is deemed to be the
appropriate space for such an encounter.
Space and place are sometimes distinguished in terms of absence–presence. That
is, place is marked by face-to-face encounters and space by the relations between
absent others. Thus, home is a place where I meet my family with regularity and is
the product of physical presence and social rituals, whereas e-mail or letters
establish contact between absent persons across space. Significantly then, a place is
the focus of human experience, memory, desire and identity (which can themselves
be understood as discursive constructions) which are the targets of emotional
identification or investment.
The concepts of ‘front’ and ‘back’ regions (derived from the work of Erving
Goffman) illustrate a fundamental divergence in social-spatial activity. Front space
is constituted by those places in which we put on a public ‘on-stage’ performance
and act out stylized, formal and socially acceptable activities. Back regions are those
spaces where we are ‘behind the scenes’ and in which we prepare for public
performance or relax into less formal modes of behaviour and speech. The social