16 In this light, feminine fetishism–the significance of girl to “contest reality” and to “deny that she’s lacking a dick”–can be interpreted in Acker’s work that is late a disavowal of lobotomy as a kind of castration with which ladies (but not only ladies) are threatened.

As a result, it really is indistinguishable through the performative statement of its very own possibility. Just as, based on Butler, the phallus attains its status being a performative statement (Bodies 83), so too Acker’s announcement of feminine fetishism, read due to the fact culmination of her pointed assaults on penis envy, situates the feminine fetish into the interpretive space exposed between your penis additionally the phallus as privileged signifier. This statement defetishizes the “normal” fetishes during the base of the Lacanian and Freudian different types of feminine heterosexuality: for Lacan, your penis while the biological signifier of “having” the phallus, as well as Freud, the child whilst the only appropriate replacement for that absence, it self a signifier of an exclusively female capability that is biological. However the fetish in Acker fundamentally replaces something which exists in neither Freud nor Lacan; it functions as the replacement for a partially deconstructed penis/phallus that plays the role of both terms and of neither. Read more →