Loose Talk

ABSTRACT

In order to be a radical political activity, lesbian theory has to resist heterosexual dominance and the terms in which that dominance and mastery are inscribed. How can this be done? This paper uses Jacques Lacan's theory of the Four Discourses to examine the discursive and subject positions involved in critical analysis of psychoanalytic theory itself. Feminist cultural analysts have attempted to adopt the position of the hysteric in critiquing the master narrative of Freud. As Jacobus (1986) shows, Freud was himself subject to hysteria in producing narratives of women and femininity. Feminist and lesbian critiques, in their attachment to woman, risk repeating the oversight of the hysteric and the analyst (and reinforcing mastery) by continuing to view sexuality in terms of a bisexuality composed of masculine and feminine components. Perhaps what is needed is an attempt to produce a discourse of perversion - not produced by Lacan - beyond the phallus and beyond the constructions of the man/woman thing.

Key Words:

• Bisexuality
• lesbian theory
• perversion
• hysteria
• Dora case
• Lacan: Four Discourses
• transference

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wendy Leeks

Wendy Leeks is Head of Academic Development in the Media/Arts Faculty at Southhampton Institute, UK. She trained as an art historian, specializing in feminist and Lacanian psychoanalytic approaches to spectatorship, developed through film theory. Her doctoral thesis investigated lesbian spectatorship of paintings by the artist J. A. D. Ingres, and included an analysis of Freud's interpretation of an instance of female “homosexual' spectatorship in the Dora case. She has published on this subject. Her current research, mainly on popular film, concerns issues of transference and queer viewing, reading, and teaching.