La Femme Qui N’existe Pas:
Pole Dancing in the Desert of the Real
[This paper was written for a class taught by Slavoj Zizek and Avital Ronnell, at NYU Fall 2011 – for which I happily received an A.]
“The gaze which seeks satisfaction by peering into intimate domain of private secrets has itself to turn into a secret, into something that strives to remain hidden, invisible in the public space.”
“What, then, is this new dimension that emerges in the gap itself? It is that of the transcendental I itself, of its ‘spontaneity’: the ultimate parallax, the third space between phenomena nd the noumenon itself, is the subject’s freedom/spontaneity.”
– Zizek, The Parallax View
The stripper climbs to the top of the pole at center-stage, and suddenly inverts her legs, so that she is hanging upside-down, spread eagle, arching her back, and allowing a veil of bleach-blonde hair to fall over an inverted frown. Gazing down on the audience from twenty feet in the air, it suddenly occurs to her that her freedom lies in the space between noumenon and phenomenon, and so she spontaneously lets out a fart.
Film theorist Laura Mulvey wrote, in an essay entitled, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that the female body is objectified by the male gaze in a cinematic language that constructs eroticism exclusively through the lens of male subjectivity. Woman is mere signifier for his desire, l’objet petit A , a mysterious gap signifying desire, but lacking meaning as a subject-in-herself. In cinema, the movement of the camera slows down upon the image of the woman, with close-up shots framing parts of her body, indicating a coveting gaze that enacts power through voyeuristic domination. The female form is assigned value according to its degree of conformity to the measurements of male desire.
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.
According to Mulvey, the pleasure of the gaze has an active and a passive element, which are gendered in nature. Mulvey categorizes these as scopophilic (male) or narcissistic (female): the scopophilic and subjective pleasure of the male protagonist or audience member, may be enjoyed passively, or empathically, through female narcissistic self-objectification. However, the subjective pleasure of the female is repressed, as the language for erotic pleasure is encoded in the patriarchal symbolic order that privileges male sexuality, leaving a muted blind spot where female desire should exist, but does not, for Woman exists only as the phallocentric Other, and so according to Lacan: “la femme n’existe pas.” Or rather, she is the object of desire, without a language or expression of her own. In Lacanian terms, the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object, which, in the patriarchal symbolic order of cinema, encodes women’s own sexuality in masculine fantasy, so that her own desire is fundamentally repressed.
Early feminist theorist, Simone de Beauvoir observed that woman’s perspective of her sexuality is from the outside looking in, causing what she calls a “doubling” of oneself as a girl reaches adulthood, “instead of coinciding exactly with herself, she [also] exist[s] outside.” From the moment of self-conscious awakening as a sexual being in the patriarchal order of desire, she is trapped in parallax view, displaced from her own subjectivity, and constantly forced to survey herself from outside. Feminist theorist Susan Bordo writes about this self-surveillance, especially of one’s body, in Unbearable Weight , noting the psychological impact of female objectification is linked to a higher incidence of anxiety, depression, and eating disorders in women. The pornographic images of women’s bodies ubiquitous in advertising and public space, invites increasing self-surveillance, which according to feminists Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, constitutes a form of social trauma, generally endured by all women. Thus, according to this paradigm of feminist anti-objectification, the stripper stands naked in the sexual political economy of Patriarchy as an entirely alienated being. She may find profit in her own spectacle, but at the cost of submitting to a gaze that imposes silence upon her own desire, by reducing her to a symbol in a simulacrum of male desire, which prefers fantasy and falsehood in a desert of the sexual-Real, over genuine contact between the sexes, through which there would always lie the threat of male castration imposed by any true expression of female sexuality.
That the strip club is a house of fantasy, a simulacrum for “authentic” sexual exchange, and also, often a house of healing for those who have been injured by the social game of sexuality, lends it the peculiar task of exchanging fantasy for fantasy and trauma for trauma between two sexes that suffer in different ways from sociosexual norms. In broad strokes, whereas male clients may suffer from the unfulfilled sexual validation that would signify masculine success, or from the confinement of monogamy that signifies good citizenship, female dancers may suffer from economic pressure due to gendered discrimination in the labor market and imbalance of household responsibilities, or from the repression of their “authentic” sexuality, and may find liberated expression through these means, the only avenues given, inadequate as they may be. Whatever the reasons either party has for engaging in this commodified fantasy exchange, there exists a distinct disconnect between the client’s objectives (power validation, sexual titillation), and the dancer’s objectives (economic gain, skillful performance) – and only through the lens of disconnect, this parallax gap, is the true nature of the encounter revealed: the sociosexual structures and institutions that encode appropriate and inappropriate behaviors between the sexes, and the porous boundaries thereof. Performance serves as a medium through which these social truths are simultaneously hidden and revealed, and money serves as the social lubricant that sets the stage.
I am not very convinced of the facile narrative of female victimization within male sexual hegemony, particularly when this narrative is applied to commercial sex workers. Given both parties are complicit in a game whose rules have been pre-defined, does the exclusion of the stripper’s “authentic” sexuality in the performance of the strip club indicate her subjugation, or rather, her skillful maneuvering of the Other’s equal subjugation to the same sociosexual norms? Is the stripper’s complicity in her own objectification a “passive” or an “active” one? Does performance reverse subject-object relations? Does it literally hold the viewer captive? Is there a space of agency between perception of desire and reflection of that desire in which the “object” is activating subjectivity, perhaps one more authentic than that which is projected upon her? Is there even such a thing as “authentic” desire, when it is always-already predefined, for heterosexual men as well as women ? Is the “male gaze,” which is locked into place upon the cinematic subject an equal, or even greater, confinement for the subject/gazer, whose inner desire is held captive, than for the body who is held externally captive via projected image?
Zizek’s theory of the tickling object reverses subject-object relations, insisting that it is the object, which is active, and the subject that is passively seduced by the movements of the object. This active tickling is made possible through the parallax view. Through a “reflexive twist” the subject “include[s] [oneself] in the picture constituted by [oneself]” by a “necessary redoubling of self as standing both outside and inside [one’s] picture, that bears witness to [one’s] ‘material existence.’” For Mulvey, woman’s view of herself, is always ever from the outside looking inwards, accentuating what Zizek calls the “blind spot” of subjectivity, which can only be made apparent through the parallax view of displaced perspective, a “reflexive short circuit” that allows one to stand “both inside and outside of [one’s] picture.” However, the Real exists only in this reflexive short circuit, and the truths of gender relations and performance power can be revealed as refracted through the looking glass.
Applying this analogy, the stripper’s redoubling of herself is far more sophisticated than her (impressive) backward bend on the pole; it is the redoubling of her consciousness that translates her image into the language of male desire, to speak effectively to his pants, that is, his wallet. But the gap between his desire and hers proves that there is necessary space between the male gaze and her own subjective interpretation of this gaze, wherein lies “autonomy” – that Enlightenment Age fetish of “individuality” and “rational freedom.” There must be a gap between noumenon and phenomenon, between the symbol of sexual desire and the stripper’s self-signification, which allows for spontaneity, misrepresentation, resistance, Accident , agency – or farting.
The stripper’s own understanding of the gap between the male language of sexuality and her subjective experience, illuminates the outlines of its muted lack, and it is this very disjuncture, which allows her an awareness of the space for self-expression separate from the constructed language that exists, a self-expression of which women who do not perform this male fantasy are not as consciously aware. It is the gap between his sexual desire and her sexual disdain that clues her into the invisible terrain where her own subjectivity lies – the illusive “female gaze” which feminist theorists like Laura Mulvey so avidly mourn. That female gaze can only be found in the space where female desire is seemingly absent, where it is hidden in the performance of another gaze; but through the disjuncture between the two, is reclaimed.
Stripper-activist Debra Sandhal wrote about her feelings towards objectification in the context of the Lusty Lady Theater, a strip club in San Francisco:
The hardest part of the job was dealing with my feminist principles concerning the objectification of women Dancing nude is the epitome of woman as sex object. As the weeks passed, I found I liked being a sex object, because the context was appropriate. I resent being treated as a sex object on the street or at the office. But as an erotic dancer, that is my purpose. I perform to turn you on, and if I fail, I feel I have done a poor job. Women who work in the sex industry are not responsible for, nor do they in any way perpetuate, the sexual oppression of women. In fact, to any enlightened observer, our very existence provides a distinction and a choice as to when a woman should be treated like a sex object and when she should not be. At the theater, yes; on the street, no. Having the distinction so obviously put out at work, I felt more personal power on the street.
Sandahl’s experience of empowerment and greater self-awareness through sex work is echoed by many other writers who express their experiences in the sex industry. What her testimony demonstrates is that when the gaze is shifted, and refocused, via the context of performance, the “objectified” can reframe and reclaim her objectification. Through the controlled boundaries of a performance space, the performer realizes the avenues in which she can exercise control via mimicry, hybridity, and a Third Space . Thus, it is through the parallax view of performed sexuality in a realm of discordant fantasies, of fantastic “gaps,” Zizek’s notion of the “blind spot,” that the stripper’s Objet petit X, ungraspable-in-itself, can be witnessed. It may be said, therefore, that the parallax view of the stripper includes not one, but two, blind spots, which serve wonderfully to illuminate one another in a parallax view of blind spots, like a Real Las Vegas of show and not tell.
The Real that is exposed through difference is the stringent structure of gender constructs, and the economics performed thereof. This is played out through the unspoken gap between fantasy and actor, a space of desire that can never be truly answered/fulfilled (objet petit a.) It is a tragedy of kabuki theater that both parties leave the strip club generally unfulfilled: the objectifier and the objectified, equally drunk and sexually frustrated. It is a greater tragedy, though, that to resist “objectification” as so many radical feminists a la Laura Mulvey, Andrea Dworkin, and Catherine MacKinnon have done, is to actually fall into a greater structural problem of gendered objectification: by aligning with traditional gender roles for women, which prescribes sexual purity and chaste modesty, as if for the benefit of the woman.
A more convincing argument to explain the role of sexual purity in gender relations can be found in the writings of Fredrick Engels, specifically in“Family, Private Property, and the State,” which demonstrates that female chastity is a tool for male domination within marriage, to ensure the passing of property onto legitimate heirs. It has long been the instrument for the enslavement of women’s bodies to reproductive slavery, particularly during times when women were not allowed to have their own property. The harsh stigma imposed upon the trespassing of this chaste code of enslavement are the most severe punishments upon women’s “authentic desire” ever invented, imposed, and Biblicized. Thus, female promiscuity is the first and gravest sin, and female sexual self-consciousness highlights a dangerous crack in Patriarchy, which must be sealed away with wedding veils or chastity belts, at all cost.
But in Las Vegas, neon poles outline the desert of the Real. The “ideological fantasy” of sexual normativity, of some standard mainstream vanilla “good” sexuality – is only held in place by the perverted BDSM, pornography, gay and fetish sex of the “Big Other.” The margins define the space within, and so, as according to Zizek, the Real lies in the margins. The stripper on the pole hangs meticulously, as a measuring-stick to society, outlining the limits of allowable sexuality.
Particularly poignant are these measuring sticks, when applied to the vulnerable male flank by a female dominatrix. BDSM is a particularly poignant dance on the frontiers of sociosexual norms. It is an explicit play of trauma: the trauma of gender relations in society, the trauma of masculinity, the trauma of silence imposed by taboo – the “Silence that offers its own syntax of testimony.” The repetition that sings of Lacanian jouissance, facilitates the emergence of truth through fantasy, through the traumatic act. According to Lacan, subjects’ fundamental fantasies are unconscious structures, which allow them to accept the traumatic loss involved in its founding sacrifice. From seven years of personal experience as a dominatrix in New York City, my submissive clients, who are mostly corporate lawyers, CEO’s, and investment bankers, high in the ranks of the corporate pyramid, are suffering silently from the traumas of the power climb, and the norms of polite society that hold their desires and behaviors in secrecy. The space of fantasy provided by the dungeon allows for Lacanian expression and reclamation of traumatic loss.
As Freud wrote in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” – “the most painful experience…can yet be felt…as highly enjoyable.” Freud’s patients, who were World War II veterans returning from the battlefield, suffered from recurring shellshocked dream. In their dream realm of fantasy, acts are recollected, repeated, and worked through. What is ruptured is memory and time – trauma interrupts these planes. The explosion of memory is not passive, for trauma is the resistance of memory to destruction, and the death drive of BDSM is resistance to obliteration via traumatic expression, perhaps a repetitive restoration to the original state. It brings the dreamer to what Walter Benjamin describes of the “high state” in his hashish-bespectacled walks in Marseille. The high of self-induced trauma, like the high of self-chosen narcotic use, is one which liberates a multiplicity of perspectives by reworking memory and perception through a veil of fantasy.“”The more closely you look at a word the more distantly it looks back”. Benjamin comments: “How things withstand the gaze.” In the context of fantasy, the act of gazing is itself reflexive, transformative, healing, yet hyperreal. The object that is gazed upon stands almost entirely independently from the meanings ascribed by the gaze, and the object that gazes withstands the gaze, becoming more distant from as the gazer falls deeper into fantasy. The fantasy of the dungeon facilitates the emergence of truth through fiction, and the reworking of memory through traumatic play.
The performer facilitates a fantasy that holds meaning separate from the performer, to which the gazer alone has access, through traumatic memory. The object of this performance is not the performer, but the trauma of the blind spot in the gazer’s Real. Though the erotic dance club is certainly a stage for this type of fantasy performance, nowhere is the psychological healing aspect of performance more explicit than in the sexual labor of BDSM. There exists extensive literature on BDSM and trauma: its potentially therapeutic nature, which I will not have space to dive into for the purposes of this essay. However, what I would like to explore is the way in which sexual trauma serves as a medium for communicating bigger traumas of power, violence, economic and political domination, gendered violence, and gendered power. Deviance, trauma’s expression, re-creation through expression, transformation – is in itself an action that has interactive consequences: for there is no expression that can be left untouched in perfect transmission, but rather, there is always a vulnerability of testimony to fiction, which leaves an opening/aporia, which is controlled by performance. This performance can be dangerously creative, and disruptive of power relations in a very real way, yet it is also ever beholden to the scripts of sexual normality. What one gets is a mere glimpse between fantasy and improvisation, wherein lies something like Spontaneity, Freedom, Truth. As Lacan wrote: the peculiarity of truth is that it expresses itself most fully in deception or falsehood. The fantasy scenarios of the dungeon have taught me, viscerally, some of the harshest secrets of reality in our gendered, economic world of work.
Judith Butler writes of gender as performance, which is inherently false/inauthentic, separate from the inner experience of the performer. Goffman/Bourdieu/John Austin wrote about the symbols that create the tapestry of this false performance. In BDSM, the performance of gender roles is reversed, the symbols intentionally perversified, in acts that ironically serve only to highlight the powerful boundaries of normality, of the standard performance of sexuality “as it should be” (my clients tend to be painfully conservative and polite in normal life, often Catholic, and often beholden to strictly self-imposed social rules.) The defiance of those rules through obstinate perversity demonstrates the trauma imposed upon the client by these very rules. Yet, there is ever hanging within the script, a space for improvisation, for the surprising, the jouissance which may liberate even the perverse from his perversity through unplanned puncture of rehearsed dreams: the Baudellairean shock that makes poetry of Arcades. In that space for spontaneity, in which the dominatrix deviates from the script, lies a creative agency that may also be liberating, and shockingly healing. The interplay between script and improvisation, the space between subject and object that makes “inter-objectification” possible, is the free exchange of trauma between client and performer. What is paid for is that particular X-factor between script and improvisation, that unique spontaneity and surprise, which makes a particular dominatrix skillful and individual. Money fails utterly as the perfect fiat for the exchange of traumatic significance – what prevails for the artists on both sides of the whip is a playground of symbols and memory.
One secret that is cheaply traded between client and performer is the “pleasurepain” of repression made explicit through guilt – guilt as the enjoyment of repression itself. Guilt is the way in which the subject enjoys his subjection to law, which he renders visible and even more powerful through transgression. Guilt is particularly enjoyable for the masochist subject, who seeks a sense of safety and security through a reassertion of the domination of the outside order that he secretly loves and craves – for the masochist is comforted by that domination, that reassertion of a secure static state of power. He restores the power, which may have been shaken by his wrongdoing, by debasing and punishing himself, and insodoing reasserting the dominance of the comforting power structure, the safety and motherhood of social convention.
Shame is in itself a sort of high, what psychologist M. Lewis calls an “adaptive disruption”: “Shame disrupts ongoing activity as the self focuses completely on itself, and the result is a state of confusion; inability to think clearly, inability to talk, and inability to act.” This inebriation of self-loathing is adaptive in that “its function is to inhibit accurate awareness of one’s surroundings, and allows one to internally change that which fails to live up to the person’s externally desired standards.” Shame serves, for the masochist, as a disruption necessary to unlock agency, by freeing him to recommit to power. It is also the blind spot through which emerges the humiliated truth.
The shaming of strippers and other sex workers by radical feminists reveals an implicit enjoyment of and submission to the Patriarchal order that created the gender roles necessary for “objectification” to exist. Even while criticizing that Patriarchal order, they seem to have a masochistic indulgence in that order, which is what allows for the protests of victimization and oppression to persist. Rather than simply transcending the gender imbalance in sex work between male clients and female performers, through encouraging more sex venues where females are the consumers of male sexuality, which would serve well to actionably counter many of the theoretical arguments which core feminists against sex consumption such as Carole Pateman and Catherin MacKinnon have made – many radical feminists seem to fetishize the notion of Patriarchy in a way that reinforces it.
My problem with classical notions of “objectification” as per Kant (human dignity as a priori, not to be used as ends), and Maxian notions of commodification/alienation, is that a world in which human beings do not use each other as ends to their own satisfaction – is pure philosophical fantasy, and privileges mental work above bodily work, as if the former could not be equally exploited, commoditized, and objectified. The feminist ideal of “non-objectification” of the female body actually replicates that oppressive bifurcation between mind and body, which is so often protested in feminist theory, by insisting that the instrumentalization of the body (bodily work) is somehow inferior to instrumentalizing the mind (mental labor) – which is a convenient claim for academic feminists to make. Their unconvincing counterargument is that there are particular “feminine” elements in the body that is not so feminized in the mind – that the mind is without gender, and therefore can not be exploited unequally – however, this claim would contradict many of the other radical feminist claims of “feminist epistemology,” which insist on the existence of women’s “ways of knowing.”
Furthermore, feminist self-surveillance in language and politically correct womanhood also serve to highlight the misogynistic “Big Other,” which through its abominable actions, defines the boundaries of ideological feminism and fuels its offended energies. Perhaps there can emerge a parallax view, where strippers and the radical feminists can get together at a cocktail party and gaze at _______ (whatever it is that would liberate them both from these gender constructs – I can’t see/say what that might be), or perhaps that is also mere fantasy born from my critical/theoretical trauma.
I conclude with a position that both radical feminists that emphasize structural gender inequality and liberal feminists that emphasize economic self-empowerment and “agency” may both be missing, a perspective that feminist scholars who are not sex workers may not understand, or care to understand: that the very performance of sex work exposes and disrupts truths of sexual socioeconomics, and creates a space for self-actualization via “traumatic play,” which does not simply kowtow to the ideological “Big Other” of Patriarchy, but rather unravels its significance by enjoying it.
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