This post is about what Lacan called the "obscurity concerning the vaginal organ." Never one to underestimate his audience, Carles presumes his readership has an encyclopedic recollection of Lacan's notorious lectures on female sexuality. Carles, thus, is at liberty to leap in with his own gloss on the controversial positions Lacan had staked out without having to drop the allusive posturing that so thoroughly problematizes and enriches Carles's discourse. Identity and undecidability, humor as both repression and sublimation -- Lacan would be wont to strikethrough Carles's text while leaving it open to scrutiny despite appearing under the sign of negation from the great psychoanalyst(Lacan).
Carles uses a photograph of a large woman, reminiscent of the subject of the earliest known examples of human art and redolent of fertility rites and rituals, to explore the Lacanian position on feminine (as opposed to female) jouissance. Writes Carles: "Not even really sure if she is ‘alternative.’ Not even sure if we are supposed to take female artists seriously. Amywinehouselittlebootslilyallenfeistjewelsherylcrowadeleduffy. Not even really sure what I should be looking 4. Maybe ‘it’s a girl thing.’" The presence of the vagina l organ, postulating castration, throws the subject into crisis and throws open the deeply suppressed possibility that the female is simply the castrated male who has adjusted to his doom -- which is why Carles is not sure if the women in question represents an "alternative" -- to male subjectivity, to being within or outside of gender, to the possibility of a female writing, a female voice. Carles accordingly strings together a series of female singers in an undifferentiated mass, positing their homogeneity in stasis, and then purports to be incapable of taking them "seriously" -- of regarding their voice as authentic rather than castrated. Lacan goes so far as to accuse women of maintaining silence about jouissance, about vaginal orgasms, shrouded in mystery. With an arch pun, he declares: "the representatives of the female sex, however loud their voices at the analysts, do not seem to have done their utmost towards the breaking of this seal."
Carles makes a similar move, reducing feminism to a mysterious insouciance represented by a boundless female body: "I feel like she is just sort of ‘famous’ for ‘being hefty and not caring abt it’ [via feminism]. I feel like she should take care of herself so that she doesn’t teach young impressionable future lesbians to ‘let themselves’ go." Sweet surrender, the jouissance of perfect recognition. Of course, that is the threat lurking behind all of Carles's sardonics, that the feminine will collapse on itself and yield a sterile, inverted homosexuality concentrated on a female sexuality liberated from the limitations imposed by the male sexual response cycle.
Having cut too close to the quick [pun intended], Carles diverts the discussion into a type of vehicle that widely serves in Western society as a signifer of emasculation: the minivan. Contrasting the minivan with an alternative transportation mode, Carles notes "Seems like a chill way 2 live, especially if u have a big family who like to chill in captains chairs and watch some TV. Might be more authentic than minivans. Feel sad about ppl who drive minivans." Here he considers the possibility the ordinary genital sexuali relations need not be fraught with fears of inevitable emasculation, typically through the conduit of the pressures and expectations of family life. Instead the male can assume "the captain's chair" of patriarchy, turning the sexual equilibrium on its head and playing the lack of male jouissance as a trump card in the struggle over gender and power.
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