Lesbian Phallus Judith Butler Analysis

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Judith Butler argues in The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary that the material and the discursive are not independent. With references to Freud, Kristeva, and Lacan’s writings, Butler refers to the lesbian phallus as a “useful fiction” because it dissociates the phallus from the penis in a way that reaffirms but also displaces its signifying power, destabilizing the heterosexual matrix. On the other hand, Josephine Ho explains the phallus in Embodying Gender as something which is “not part of the self” and in need “to get rid of it”. Ho illustrates the contradictions and difficulties faced by trans-genders in their construction of the ‘self-identity’, and how the body is shaped with the image of self through modification of their bodies. Ho references how the trans-genders of Taiwan are …show more content…

And this identification of the “ideal I” and the ego’s unity begins to change in this symbolic realm and society. In other words, Butler is against self-identity as mere identification through imaginary contours while Ho cites that the mirror is not the object used by trans-genders to identify themselves. The lesbian phallus thus works precisely where it is not the distinction between appearance and reality that must be clarified but the difference within appearance that needs to be manifested. The phallus is also never securely possessed and its potential absence (based on its actual inexistence) is the source of a perpetual anxiety. We may also relook at Butler’s positing of the lesbian phallus and say that the lesbian phallus does not simply parody what doesn’t exist (the phallus). It can also represent the difference between the way things like the phallus seem to us (in fantasy) and the way they really seem to us (in a reality that is only supportable, only bearable, when shot through with

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