Abstract

This paper examines how and if Žižek can be useful to feminists as a guide to Lacan’s formulation of femininity. North American feminists, despite the classic status of Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism, may speak of Lacan, but not always as well as one might wish, even given the particular aims of their appropriation . Given this, many Lacanians have expressed bafflement and simply left feminism to feminists. Žižek falls into another category, being engaged with feminist thought, either through his critiques of Foucault/historicism or his return to questions of sexual difference. The latter interest usually aims toward clarifying some relation between the Symbolic and the Real. Even given this philosophical horizon, Žižek’s thought is often taken as representative of Lacanian thought as a whole. In the main, feminist reservations about Lacan refer to what it perceives as the temporal stasis inherent to Žižek’s Lacanian structuralism, the exclusion of women from the “Symbolic”, and the privileging of the phallus. The paper re-visits feminist and Žižek’s explications of such dimensions. It remarks on those moments in which Žižek has carefully addressed feminist concerns and when his work can be productively questioned. But it also indicates that the insistent barrier between feminism and Lacan, Žižek’s work notwithstanding, still entails numerous feminist misappropriations