User:Jacobisq/Phalllocentrism
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Phallocentrism is the assumption that the phallus is the central element both in sexual development, and in the ordering of the social world.
First phase
The term was coined in 1927 by Ernest Jones, as part of his debate with Freud over the role of the phallic stage in childhood development, when he argued that “men analysts have been led to adopt an unduly phallo-centric view”.Quoted in K. K. Reithven, Feminist Literary Studies (1990) p. 54 Drawing on the earlier arguments of Karen Horney,P. Gay, Freud (1989) p. 520 Jones in a series of articles maintained the position that women were not disapponted creatures driven by penis envy, but that contrariwise such an analytic belief was itself a theoretical defence against castration anxiety. Freud however remained unmoved in his opposition to the Horney/Jones thesis,S. Freud, On Sexuality (PFL 7) p. 391-2 and his was the predominant psychoanalytic position thereafter, though some like Janet Malcolm would modify his position to the effect that “Freud's concept, of course, is...a description of phallocentrism, not a recommendation of it”.Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman (1995) p. 87
Second phase
Jacques Lacan added a linguistic turn to the debate with his article “The Signification of the Phallus” (1958/65), arguing that the phallus was not a part-object, an imaginary object, or a physical organ, but rather “the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signifier...this signifying function of the phallus”.J. Lacan, Ecrits (1997) p. 285-8
Jacques Derrida influentially challenged his thesis as phallocentric, and the charge was taken up enthusiastically by second-wave feminism,J. Childers ed., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) p. 225 extending the focus of their protest from Lacan to Freud,P. Gay, Freud (1989) p. 774 psychoanalysis, and male thinking as a whole:E. Ermath, Sequel to History (1992) p. 172-3 the way that “The phallus, centre of meaning, became man's identity with himself...a masculine symbolic”.Andrea Nye, quoted in E. Ermath, Sequel to History (1992) p. 172-3
However complications quickly arose within feminism over the issue. E. Amour, Deconstruction (1999) p. 207 Some French feminists, seeing phallocentrism and feminism as two sides of the same coin, sought to make a postphallicist breakthrough.E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (2005) p. 365 Others, like the English feminist Jaqueline Rose – while accepting that “Lacan was implicated in the phallocentrism he described”J. Rose ed., Feminine Sexuality (1982) p. 56 - nevertheless considered his analysis as important for an understanding of how women were constituted as a split subject in society.
Third phase
From a postcolonial perspective, however, all such theoretical debates merely revealed the irrelevance of first world feminists, with their phallocentric preoccupations, to the ordinary life of the subaltern woman in the Third World;P. Mackay, Kathy Acker and Transnationalism (2009) p. 94 and Third-wave feminism, with its concern for the marginalised, the particular, and for intersectionality, has also broadly seen the theoreticism and essentialism of feminism's earlier concern for phallocentrism as irrelevant to daily female experience.L. Heywood, Third Wave Agenda (1997) p. 135 Gayatri Spivak has even gone so far as to suggest that feminism needs to negotiate an accomodation with phallocentrism.G. C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic (2014) p. 147
See also
References
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External links
[http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405183123_chunk_g978140518312339_ss1-2 Phallus/Phallocentrism]