The Nemesis of the Freudian ‘Castrated’ Woman: The Terrifying ‘Castrating’ Demoiselle in Mom (2017) and NH10 (2015)

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Notes

1 Freud makes an unfounded assumption, owing to his subscription to the primacy of the penis, that children would innately equate a lack of the penis in a woman with a castrated state. Discussing Han’s phobia in the Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, Freud argues that Hans’s acquaintance with the knowledge that women possess no penis ‘was bound to have had a shattering effect upon his self-confidence and to have aroused his castration complex’ (Freud, 1909, 36), a reasoning which Freud foregrounds in the male child’s lack of awareness regarding the existence of the phallic counterpart of the vagina (Freud 1909, 106, 110).

2 This text is important as it marked the official entry of Freud’s theory of castration into his theoretical underpinnings.

3 Those ‘having’ the phallus are perceived to be ‘possessing phallic signifiers of various sorts; that is, signifiers of phallic endowment, be it of money, power, wealth, accomplishment’, while ‘being’ the phallus amount to ‘enacting those signifiers of that which is most cherished or desired’ (Hook 2006, 80). This has been criticised as resting on heteronormative logic as ‘“having” the Phallus (the position of men) and “being” the Phallus (the paradoxical position of women)’ are ‘mutually exclusive positions’ (Butler 1999, 56).

4 This image of the castrated woman was further extended by Jacques Lacan who made the castrated woman ‘the catalyst for the male’s accession to the symbolic and to language’ (Lurie 1981, 52).

5 Widdler—Wiwimacher in the original German text—is the term used by Hans, colloquially, to refer to the penis.

6 This phallic ‘lack’ is reiterated by Freud throughout the text Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. See pages 31, 32, 36, 110 and 135 of the text for details.

7 The notion of becoming, in a Deleuzian sense, allows for the ‘affirmation of the positivity of difference, meant as a multiple and constant process of transformation. Both teleological order and fixed identities are relinquished in favour of a flux of multiple becoming’ (Braidotti 1993, 44).

8 Lurie further stresses the vaginal castrating prowess that manifests itself during the act of sexual intercourse, ‘in coitus, the male not only joins with the woman, but the penis “disappears” inside her, and what he gets back is somewhat less than it was’ (Lurie 1981, 55).

9 At this juncture, it is imperative to bring to light Barbara Mehrhof’s suggestion of calling the act of intercourse as ‘enclosure’, rather than the phallus-centric term of ‘penetration’ (Brownmiller 1993, 334).

10 As Freud states, it ‘reminds us of the habit of the snake charmers, who make poisonous snakes first bite a piece of cloth in order to handle them afterwards without danger’ (Freud 1918, 206).

11 ‘Little girls often make no secret of their envy nor of the hostility towards their favored brothers which arises from it. They even try to urinate standing upright like their brothers in order to prove the equality which they lay claim to’. (Freud 1918, 205).

12 Discourse analysis is a qualitative research and analytical tool aimed at understanding and interpreting texts in written, oral or graphical visual forms, and is thereby ‘concerned with the investigation of language’ and human communication (Gillen and Peterson 2005, 146).

13 According to this myth, whose traces can be found ‘from the earliest times to the present, from New Zealand to North America to India’, (Raitt 1980, 416) vaginas are equipped with fangs ever ready to geld those who encroach upon the woman’s sexuality. Vagina dentata personifies the capacity of the woman to undertake a literal castration of the men with whom she performs coital acts: the men lose their penis after having entered the woman’s vagina. The purpose of the myth of the vagina dentata may be to imply the terror which men associate with the woman, and with her sexuality, in particular. The tale signifies the general fear and apprehensiveness characterising mankind when encountered with something that is unhackneyed and mysterious, and more particularly the male dread of entering the female genital with all its paraphernalia of inconspicuousness.

14 Although Lacan denies the readily available association between the penis and the phallus so intrinsically present in the colloquial understanding and elucidates the phallus ‘as a signifier rather than as an organ or an object’ (McGowan 2019, 2), the distinction rests on a slippery platform and thus, is all too easily confounded. Also, the phallus functions in a manner as to allow the penis to define and be the exemplar of all forms of sexuality (Grosz 1990, 17; Creed 1993, 593).

15 Such associations have found their way in popular discourses too and are used, for instance, ‘in chants of the US Marine Corps (“This is my rifle [holding up gun]/ this is my gun [pointing at penis]/one’s for killing/ the other’s for fun”) or in pro-gun bumper stickers available in South Africa (“Gun Free South Africa — Suck my Glock”)’ (Myrttinen 2003, 39, 40).

16 Quoting a slasher director Dario Argento, ‘I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man’ (Clover 1987, 204).

17 It is quite a commonsensical observation that in the very core of the rural setup of the subcontinent, male children, from a very tender age, are frequently exposed to the consternating and reprimanding remarks and abuses at the hands of the ruling patriarchs of the family, in an attempt to obfuscate their natal pre-phallic emasculated selves.

18 It is the term used by Freud which straightforwardly translates to English as ‘unhomely’.

19 Taking into account the linguistic usage of the term randi in the spatio-temporal geography of North India, the term literally translates to a ‘whore’ but is derogatorily employed as an insulting remark for a woman who does not adhere to the user’s moral yardstick.

20 Pratiksha Baxi, Shirin M Rai, and Shaheen Sardar Ali, in ‘Legacies of Common Law: “crimes of honour” in India and Pakistan’ throw light on the existence and ascendency exercised by ‘non-state legal mechanisms as well as state laws’ in disciplining, punishing and regulating ‘women’s sexual choices’ (Baxi, Rai, and Ali 2006, 1239).

21 While sali literally means the sister of a person’s wife, it is pejoratively used to throw insults at women.

22 ‘The avenging woman narrative proceeds on a transgressive vigilante path, incites masculine anxiety about the phallic female’ (Gopalan 1997, 52).

23 Such disposition results from a failure of the intended Oedipal resolution of the castration fear, leading to the development of what Freud classifies as perverted sexuality in the form of fetishism, wherein the adult fetishists’ sexual obsession with apparently non-sexual objects such as high-heels, pantyhose, etc. hinges upon their unconscious association of these objects with the ‘perceived’ penis that the woman possesses. Hence, as conceptualized by Freud, ‘the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up’ (Freud 1927, 152–153).

24 Laura Mulvey, in her analysis of visual pleasures derived from cinema, argues that scopophilia is the voyeuristic pleasure intensified by the structures of the cinema halls that create an impression of us peeping into people’s lives.

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N Eshika

N Eshika is a Ph.D. Candidate at Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi, Delhi.