5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
Lacan was not much interested in the social application of his theories. But this has not
prevented feminists from making critical appropriations of Lacanian psychoanalysis for
rethinking the social theory of gender. Interest in Lacan’s ideas for feminism was
initiated in the English-speaking world by Juliet Mitchell, who in Psychoanalysis and
Feminism (1974) uses Freud and Lacan to explore the contemporary gender system.
In Mitchell’s Lacanian-based feminism, an analysis of sexual politics is developed
which stresses that the symbolic order of language creates sexual division. Gendered
subjectivity, for Mitchell, is necessarily tied to a fundamental loss: that of maternal,
imaginary space. In this connection, the phallus, as ‘transcendental signifier’, functions
as an imaginary lining or construction which masks the lack of the human subject at
the level of sexual division. Yet the crucial point, according to Mitchell, is that these
imaginary scenarios position males and females within unequal gender relations.
Man is constituted as a self-determining, autonomous agent, and woman as the
lacking Other, as sexual object. Using Lacanian theory against itself, however, Mitchell
also explores potentialities for gender transformation. Though the phallus may stand
for entry to the symbolic order, Mitchell claims, it is an imaginary object that either sex
can secure once and for all. Seen as a transactional negotiation of identity, the phallus
need not be tied to male domination. Mitchell thus concludes: ‘Some other expression
of the entry into culture than the implication for the unconscious of the exchange of
women will have to be found in non-patriarchal society’ (1974:415).
Though generating much interest at the time, most commentators would now agree
that Mitchell’s analysis of gender contains serious theoretical and political
difficulties. It seems to assume, for example, that the social reproduction of sexuality
and gender is a relatively stable affair, without allowing room for the contradictions
and ambiguities of split subjectivity and the unconscious. This involves important
political implications. For if women are symbolically fixed in relation to masculinity as
the lacking Other, via a repression of desire, then it remains far from clear as to why
women would ever feel compelled to question or challenge the contemporary gender
system. This point can be made in another way. The Lacanian specification of the
feminine as that which is always defined negatively—lack, the Other, the dark
continent —carries a number of theoretical and political ambiguities. On the one
hand, Lacan’s doctrines have been a valuable theoretical resource for feminists
analysing how women are rendered the excluded Other in patriarchal discourse and
culture. On the other hand, the recurring problem for feminism when set within
Lacanian parameters is that all dimensions of human sexuality become inscribed
within the signifier and therefore trapped by the Law. Lacan’s reduction of the
feminine to mere oppositeness implies that woman can be defined only as mirror to