Hegel and Lacan both conceptualize of relations to each othe and orgins of self-consciousness, yet both focus on a phallocentric perspective and subjugate women within their works. I imagine a feminist reworking of these concepts in which Hegel's master-slave dialectic reveals the power of the feminine perspective and Lacan's self defeat is overcome. For Black lesbians, factors such as colorism and racism come into play as well as sexism in deconstructing the myths of womanhood perpetuated by white and Black phalluses. To overcome these structures is to analyze and deconstruct male dominated viewpoints.
The central writers employed in this text think of gender in sexual terms and in terms of male and female - While not reflective of the actuality of gender experiences in their spectrum, Lacan, Hegel, and Freud, originator of the phallus we find ourselves fixated on, use woman and man in a biological aspect rather than one expressive of gender identities and the range of experiences included under the term woman. To understand these texts, it must be understood that the woman in this case is a person who possesses internal reproductive organs. Much of the focus is placed on the possession or lack of certain genitals. However, Lacan also seeks to abstract the phallus from the penis, and therein lies the potential for sex nonconformity and the concept of the black phallus and "lesbian phallus" (Butler 64). Written in a time where it was especially true that "the matrix of gender relations [exists] prior to the emergence of human," while Lacan and Hegel provide insights on the experience of women and men, they exist within cisnormative societies that supplant ideas of femininity and masculinity into every aspect of being (7).
Hegel subjugates the woman to the role of child bearer and mother; noting this, I turn to the master-slave dialectic and find that "certain passages in the argument employed by Hegel in defining the relation of master to slave apply much better to the relation of man to woman" (de Beauvoir 90). In this hypothetical situation, one "does not see [the bondsman] as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self" (Hegel 630). Considering this relationship from the perspective of a woman in relation to a man, the feminine is always subjugated to the role of the bondsman - however, as Hegel makes clear, this position as bondsman is one of real power.
Margo Crawford writes on Gertrude Stein's Three Live's representation of women of color and queerness. Author Barbara Christian advises to "consider literary narrative as a place where theory takes place," so if we apply a theorist lens to Stein's work, there are both Lacanian and Hegelian imaginings applicable (Butler 182). Rose and Melanctha are respectively dark-skinned and light-skinned, and in their relationship, the associations held with these skin tones are shown. "Melanctha's desire to serve darker-skinned Rose becomes a latent sadomasochistic relationship in which Stein recasts the dark-skinned black mammy stereotype as the person with the phallus and makes the light-skinned femme fatale the person who desires to be dominated and feels a sense of power while serving the dominatrix" (25) - Essentially, the light-skinned is emasculated, and dark skin masculinized. Three Lives gestures towards "queering" colorism and the idea of the black phallus as a construct which crosses genders in its association with dark skin (24).
"Lacan uses the photography metaphor of 'enter[ing] light' and 'embod[ying] light' to explain the very process of becoming a subject" (Crawford 31). In this way, through the lens of photography, Lacan associates lightness and "white light" with the very fundamentals of becoming a person. Crawford argues that this reveals the "racial fetishism, the skin color fetishism, embedded in black and white photography" and art (31). The Black Art Movement sought to overcome this theory and to reframe Lacanian ideals - men in the Black Art Movement wanted to test a hypothesis. What happens "when the word 'black' is added to the term 'phallus'" (3)?
"Lacan insists that 'the phallus is a signifier,' whereas [Frantz] Fanon decides that the 'Negro is the genital'" (3). Unsurprisingly then, in this case, "Lacan's use of the word 'phallus' gains a fundamentally different shape" (4). In "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action" (1965), Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceptualizes of "emasculated black man and castrating black woman" (70-71). Black women were depicted as domineering forces and, while possessing a phallus in this case, it is only from the castration of the husband figure. Hence, the urge to overcome the phallus as a concept for women. Black Power and the BAM seeks to reframe the focus from "the black woman as the castrating figure to the insistence on the white power that has debilitated black men" (71). However, this is still a male-centric view of resistance. Many female creators under the BAM utilize the black phallus as a concept, yet still more call for "cracking through the veneer of this sick society's definition of 'masculine' and 'feminine'" (72). The BAM, though it focuses on defining a distinct black phallus from the white phallus, failed to wrap women's struggles into this matter and into the reclamation of the black phallus. The indulgence in "black fetishism" (7) left women "often objectified...even as [men] engaged in the laudable attempt to remove black women from the dominant visual culture that continues to define quintessential femininity through the sign of the white woman's body" (69). The Black woman is turned into a symbol, a Black queen, perhaps, and thought of as the Black mother. Male perspectives in the BAM continue to perpetuate the Hegelian myth of motherhood as an essential state.
Faith Ringgold's piece Woman Looking in a Mirror, engages the idea of the mirror stage; this occurs in recognition of the self as an other through which the self is perceived, creating an ideal-I. Rinngold in this work butts against the idea of light-skinned superiority as in the mirror where she beholds herself, her skin is darker, yet she smiles in a knowingly self-loving way. Ringgold arguably promotes the subtle subversion of the ideal-I in this image, reframing her ideal self into one that doesn't hold up to the external gazes, white and masculine, but to her own.
Judith Butler explores the idea of the lesbian phallus in her writing Bodies that Matter, considering a Lacanian reframing that "consign[s] the penis, conventionally described as 'real anatomy' to the domain of the imaginary" (61). Lacan possesses a desire to "separate phallus from penis, to control the meaning of the signifier phallus," yet in failing to command the meaning of the word phallus, "symbolic castration" occurs (57). In his book Feminine Sexuality, he seeks to describe the woman's aphallic existence, and the phallic nature of the mother concept. Lacan believes that little girls consider themselves "castrated, in the sense of being deprived of the phallus, at the hand of someone who is in the first instance her mother" (3). The references the Moynihan report, once more, in the concept of the castrating woman, but Lacan takes this further in saying, "at a more primordial level the mother is for both sexes considered as provided with a phallus, that is, as a phallic mother" (3) - the woman creates autonomy and self consciousness through motherhood once more. However, is there a possible escape from this system? Lacan mentions the clitoris as being "raised to the function of the phallus" (3). Perhaps this can be considered in terms of lesbianism and the lesbian phallus. By placing a prime focus upon the pleasure of the woman in lesbian sex, and excluding the male from the act, lesbians in strap on sex reconstruct the phallus on their own terms, or are able to exclude the concept of phallus entirely from their domain. A strap on, afterall, focuses the pleasure and pressure of the motion onto the clitoris.
The phallus can be fully alienated from the masculine form and the anatomical meaning to be a symbol for Black Power, lesbian autonomy, and black lesbian women, while, in form, is also overcome and proves a faulty system of understanding the world and interactions. Hegel's master-slave dialectic proves inadequate terms for describing the experience of woman as the true "absolute other" as described by de Beauvoir (160), who postulates that the woman takes hold of her otherness and that therein lies her power. While the Lacanian and Hegelian systems of thought provide interesting concepts that provide seminal in feminist reimaginings, these imaginings prove that these systems are ultimately inadequate and the phallus mostly exists as a prison and attempts to put shackles on the notions of womanhood and what it means to be a woman. Existing in otherness, black lesbians not only redefine the phallus, but define themselves in terms not associated with sexual organs and allow for a more kaleidoscopic consciousness, in the words of Jose Medina, that encompasses not only the notions of black and white and female and male but a more "fluid way of imagining ourselves and others in which patterns of relations are constantly emerging and vanishing, seamlessly and ceaselessly, with some relational possibilities giving way to others, constantly resisting the ossification of our categories" (22). Existing outside the binary and resisting classic structures of motherhood asserts a strength to Lesbian experiences that frees subjects from the need to express oneself in terms of masculinity and femininity, and in these notions.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter, on the Discursive Limits of "Sex." Roudege, 1993. https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Butler_Judith_Bodies_That_Matter_On_the_Discursive_Limits_of_Sex_1993.pdf.
Chambers, Eddie and Margo Crawford. "When Black Experimentalism became Black Power." The Routledge Companion to African American Art History. Routledge, 2020.
Crawford, Margo. Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus. Ohio State University, 1993. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/159603338.pdf.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Jonathan Cape, 1956. https://newuniversityinexileconsortium.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Simone-de-Beauvoir-The-Second-Sex-Jonathan-Cape-1956.pdf.
Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University, 1977.
Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality. W. W. Norton & Company, 1985. https://chinese.wooster.edu/files/lacan.pdf.
Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell, 1998.
Medina, Jose. The Epistemology of Resistance : Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford University, 2004. https://archive.org/details/epistemologyofre0000medi/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater.
Rinngold, Faith. Woman Looking in a Mirror. 2022.