Opengender

Mulvey's formulation left the heterosexual feminist "restless," and the lesbian inarticulable except as identification with an institutionally masculine position offered in the relay. Desubjectivising models such Case's (1988/9) and de Lauretis' (1991) theorised a deconstructive lesbian refusal of any stable gender-position and a dissemination of subjectivity in a lesbian performative and exhibition context — but this obviously cannot be applied to lesbian reading of mainstream film. Furthermore, the quotidian importance of female pro-activity to the lesbian agenda can be marginalised by a discourse of purely textually deconstructive desires. But how is such an agenda to be signified without binding the lesbian over to an inversionary phallicism on the one hand or to a feminine 'nature' on the other? How is the lesbian critic to take account both of the need to trouble and exceed heterosexual gender categories and yet to avoid a depoliticisisation or degendering of modes of lesbian resistance to female subordination and enforced passivity?

De Lauretis proposed, a feminist rewriting of the Freudian account of "penis envy:"

But if, to the female subject of perverse desire, castration means first and foremost a lack of being in her body-ego consequent upon the narcissistic wound [castration], and only secondarily the lack of a penis, then it is the former - the lack of a libidinally invested body-image, a feminine body that can be narcissistically loved - that threatens the subject most deeply. And it is against this threat that the mechanism of disavowal intervenes to defend the ego by producing the compromise fantasy 'I don't have it but I can/will have it' ... (de Lauretis, 1994: 262)

De Lauretis' argument, which retains a model of the drives but emphasises the contingency of their organisation in culture, still articulates lesbianism as a wish to have (what) the phallus (signifies in western culture), however. A rearticulation of Lacan's psychoanalytic account of the processes of narcissism and ego formation as discourse may be more helpful in superseding these contradictions.

Narcissism, which is argued to effect a primary male identification with male morphology in the cinematic image, has a crucial function for Lacan in the production of male subjectivity itself. His formulation of the mirror stage through which the (male) child is first able to exteriorise his own (imaginary) image, links motor activity to the development of an egotistical projection of self into the world and thus the development of a nascent sense of mastery over space (see Lacan's exposition, 1966: 2-7). The processes by which motor activity is translated into an effective engagement with the world (control of environment) depends on the establishment of a coherent (if illusionary) image of self-in-the-world. Located in the fictive space of the mirror image in which the boy orients himself by matching his motor activity to his own projection of visual surface the materialised surface of self-in-the-world takes on a unitary (phallic) morphology. It is therefore dependent not only on a visual projection reserved to male authority but on the very physicality whose restraint is a constitutive factor in the production of femininity.

Foucault's (1982) analytic postulation of the potential for the discursive production of oppositional subjectivities makes new feminist arguments available. Bartky (1988) analysed Foucault's (1979) failure to address the gendering of the body in his account of the disciplinary practices which produce the "docile" body. She identified the aims of three categories of feminine-coercive practice:

Those that aim to produce a body of a certain size and general configuration; those that bring forth from this body a specific repertoire of gestures, postures, and movements; and those that are directed toward the display of this body as an ornamented surface ... (which) must be understood in the light of the modernization of patriarchal domination (Bartky, 1988:

Bartky went on to discuss a certain bodily attitude to space:

[A] space seems to surround women in imagination that they are hesitant to move beyond: this manifests itself both in a reluctance to reach, stretch, and extend the body to meet resistances of matter in motion - as in sport or in the performance of physical tasks - and in a typically constricted posture and general style of movement. Woman's space is not a field in which her bodily intentionality can be freely realized but an enclosure in which she feels herself positioned and by which she is confined. The "loose woman" violates these norms: her looseness is manifest not only in her morals, but in her manner of speech and quite literally in the free and easy way she moves. (Bartky, 1988: 66)

This restrictive space is generated by physically constraining clothing and footwear, as well as by personal boundaries instituted by rules about touching in public space which ensure that women take up very little space and yet remain within that limiting space. The training begins young in the mother's attitude towards the girl-child which discourages and often physically restrains expansive outward movements. This is contrary to attitudes to boy-children who are encouraged endlessly to use and control their environment with their bodies.

These physical restraints which constitute heterosexual femininity also weaken the process of spatial orientation described by Lacan in which motor activity is projected and translated into effective engagement of a coherently imagined self with a coherently imagined world. As the woman takes up an adult heterosexual-feminine position in the western cultural narrative, this spatial configuration is effectively broken altogether. It is feminine overpresence with the image that obviates not only control over her own representation (in discourse) but also the use and control of space through physical engagement with the world (as well as the physical pleasures associated with motor excitement). The presence of women in public (male) domains, such as professional hierarchies, may open access to a phallicising (masculinising) status but it does not, in itself, alter the spatial 'force-field' and the enforced receptivity (to the male) which encloses the heterosexual woman's constrained body and cuts off her pleasure in engagement with the physical world, as well as with other women.

In Foucauldian terms, the ever-present networks of restraint and coercion which foreclose girls' outward movement must analytically infer, and thus may discursively produce, resistance — in the materialisable form of a capacity for expansive action on the girl's part. That is, the techniques by which the patriarchal order disciplines and produces passive, feminised, bodies simultaneously open out the possibility for refusal and for the production of reverse-discursive spaces and counter-identifications. Whilst Penelope (1986) did not claim a Foucauldian method or position, this kind of reverse-discursive space is, in effect, where she located her feminist construct of the 'dyke' when she argued that the constructs 'real woman' or 'real man' posit an 'unreal' gender-alignment. This is the discursive space in which resistant possibilities such as lesbianism open out (see Penelope, 1986: 60).

Butler's Foucauldian (1993: 73-4) argument repositions Lacan's account of the acquisition of the bodily imago upon which the ego is articulated as an account of the materialisation of "a sedimented history of imaginary relations" (74) and not as an account of the given function of the body in process of the acquisition of phallic identity. She thus refigured the 'lesbian phallus' as a contradictory signifier which calls into question the privileged status of the phallus as origin and controller of meanings. A lesbian will to establish or extend a coherent self into the world via an imaginary primary narcissism need not, then, be read as necessarily either an essentialising or a phallicising drive:

If this analysis invites the charge of penis envy, it also forces a reconsideration of the unstable status of identification in any envious act: there is in the very structure of envy the possibility of an imaginary identification, a crossing over into a "having" of the phallus that is both acknowledged and blocked. And if there is a law that must compel a feminine identification with a position of castration, it appears that this law "knows" that identification could function differently, that a feminine effort to identify with "having" the phallus could resist its demand, and that this possibility must be renounced ... that vain striving to approximate and possess what no one ever can have, but anyone sometimes can have in the transient domain of the imaginary. (Butler, 1993: 104-5)

Butler's analysis problematises essentialising lesbian-feminist accounts of butch identity such as Ruston's (1986). We may figure a gender-undifferentiated infancy, as posited by Freud and Lacan, but any assumption that this is co-extensive with the socialised activity or identity of the adult male can be rejected. Masculine proactive use of space is, in terms of a Foucauldian discursive model, as much a product of processes of discipline as the passivity of the feminised body. That is, the male body is not free from discursive productivity; it is produced in and through exhortation to active engagement with, and extension into, its environment through the repetition of gestures which signify spatial control and physical strength. For Butler, the lesbian phallus signifies not the inevitability of an association of proactivity with masculinity, but rather the undoing of such an association.

But precisely because it is an idealization, one which no body can adequately approximate, the phallus is a transferable phantasm, and its naturalized link to masculine morphology can be called into question through an aggressive reterritorialization ... It also means that there is not necessarily one imaginary schema for the bodily ego, and that cultural conflicts over the idealization and degradation of specific masculine and feminine morphologies will be played out at the site of the morphological imaginary in complex and conflicted ways. (Butler, 1993: 87)

Identificatory attitudes on the part of lesbians towards the phallically-coded tomboy cannot, in such terms, be assumed to represent a will on the part of those lesbians to occupy the position of men in a mimetic reproduction of the hetero-masculine order. On the contrary, they might be seen as signifying resistance to the disciplines of the feminisation process and a resultant shift in the lesbian imaginary — a new "schema" for the lesbian bodily ego and a lesbian proactivity. As one might then expect, lesbian pleasure in the tomboy image does not appear, from either anecdotal or literary evidence which I have previously cited, to be confined to those lesbian individuals who take on a butch persona.

Motor efficiency and the spatial orientation of a coherent self-image are prerequisites of any effective agency in western culture — an agency traditionally denied to (or by) heterosexual women. Insofar as purposeful movement and the extension of the self into physical space are (contingently) designated masculine in culture, the lesbian will to autonomy, freedom of movement, and motor pleasure, signifies as phallic. The medieval charge of 'looseness' and the modern charge of 'mannishness' function simply as the limits of permitted feminine use of language, bodily action, and the development of an effective spatial orientation, as prerequisites of competent subjective agency. Rather than participating nostalgically in the phallic-narcissistic pleasures offered in the Western film-text, the lesbian spectator of the cinematic tomboy might be said to be bringing to the text a more radical practice of resistance which exceeds the binary terms in which Mulvey problematised the relation of the (heterosexual) feminine spectator to the masculinised image of the female protagonist.

In short, the conflict between desire for pro-activity and the requirements of correct femininity (which, for Mulvey, constitute the struggle instituted by the image of the tomboy for the heterosexual feminine spectator) simultaneously references a mode of lesbian resistance. The social presentation (sedimented into an identification) of Mulvey's heterosexual female spectator is challenged and potentially radically destabilised by this image and this is why she experiences a restless discomfort. She risks exclusion from the dominant heterosexual culture if she cannot successfully re-naturalise her disrupted feminine identification. It seems rather glaringly obvious, on the other hand, that few lesbians would have much investment in preserving a heterosexual-feminine social adjustment. On the contrary, lesbian resistance to the feminisation process has been coded, narrated and materialised (lived as cultural practice) in many different ways — one of which was by the publicised choice of utilitarian clothing and the display of mannerisms of competence. Lesbians (whether identifying as butch, femme, or feminist) have frequently articulated, and materialised, a lesbian identity precisely in and through refusals of the discursive construct of heterosexual-feminine passivity.

This is not to say that lesbians are necessarily 'unfeminine,' or would signify themselves always and everywhere by phallic coding or masculine stylisation. It is actually Mulvey's heterosexual-feminist formulation which problematises the inclusion of lesbianism in the category of femininity here. Whilst lesbians are hardly immune from the cultural unease described by Mulvey, they are at least able and willing to support one another in resisting its controlling effects. Dealing with the discomfort engendered by the reactionary pathologisation by the dominant culture of lesbian modes of resistance is an ongoing process for lesbians and one which is reflected in lesbian literatures. For the lesbian spectator, the reverie of forbidden physicality evoked by the tomboy seems to have been re-deployed to reinforce lesbian resistances to prohibitions on female physicality in general.

J A MARQUIS: From film I got a sense of the roles women didn't play. Strong women are aberrant in this society and it's a conflict society hasn't worked out as well as I have. Women were supposed to be goody-two-shoes, beautiful and stereotypically flawless. Being a lesbian was coming to terms with that and it was quite a release. It was like a whole bunch of chains fell off. (Whitaker, 1985: 114)

The lesbian, who is already excluded from the heterosexual order, has little to lose and much to gain as the spatial configuration necessary to facilitate a female-morphological imago of an active relation to environment is, for once, effectively completed in the fantasy space of the relay. For many lesbians, there is a sheer pleasure in the tomboy's facility in managing 'ornery horses, riding, shooting, yelling, and cursing, which they refuse to disavow. Indeed, both the character of Calamity Jane and Merck's analysis of her image end up "back on the buckboard where she first began" (Merck, 1980: 25).