Digital feminisms and the split subject: Short-circuits through Lacan's four discourses

This paper takes the emergent field of digital feminisms as a case for thinking about the ways in which Jacques Lacan's theory of the four discourses - that of the master, hysteric, university, and analyst - can contribute to our understanding of the subject in digitally mediated communications. Lacan's theory is useful in articulating the relationship between the feminist subject, knowledge production, and the modes of enjoyment that structure speech particularly where feminist discourses are animated in digital communications. As a protest discourse, feminist discourse has been equated with the productive discourse of the hysteric, but once institutionalized, I argue, it takes on the structure of the university discourse, bypassing the critical phase of the analyst. Digital feminisms offer a particularly reflective case for understanding this structural shift as, with no gatekeepers, nothing impedes the personal becoming political in digitally mediated spaces. Here, the structure of feminist discourses is amplified, exposing the dynamic affects in different discursive positions that obfuscate communication and make 'true dialogue' problematic. Drawing on Lacan's theory of the four discourses, I map some of these affects as digital feminist discourses shift into the position of knowledge (what Lacan calls S2), where they are divided - cut off from their own experience and enjoyment - and positioned to address the jouissance of the Other. In this, I hope to show how Lacan's theory of discourse offers a means of understanding the frustrations felt in much digitally mediated communication

The Persephone complex: post-feminist impasses in popular heroine television

© 2012 Dr. Alison HorburyIn this thesis I examine why the myth of Persephone is being retold in post-feminist media cultures where traditional feminist critiques have been otherwise foreclosed. Using psychoanalytic theory, I argue that this Persephone is a symptom of an impasse around the question of what it means to be a woman. I consider four popular television heroines who personify this phenomenon––Ally McBeal, Sydney Bristow, Veronica Mars and Meredith Grey––to demonstrate how Persephone’s story animates the question of sexuation or sexual difference today

What Does Feminism Want?

Like Freud’s famous inquiry ‘what does a woman want?’, this paper asks a similar question of the signifier ‘feminism’ for if one aims to (re)imagine feminism for the new millennium one must first ask: what does Feminism want? This (imperfect) reference to Freud’s question hopes to draw attention to the particular and the universal underpinning the signifier feminism, a slipperiness that works idiosyncratically at the threshold of public and private politics which, though it is perhaps the most unifying aspect of feminism, nevertheless undermines it. To politicize the personal one must question the signifier that comes to universalize an indefinite article for, as I argue in this paper, what ‘a’ woman wants is beneath the bar of what Feminism wants when it is mounted in public discourse. To continue to invest publically in a signifier of personal politics––as Jacqueline Rose advocates (2014)––then, one must rephrase the question: of what does this signifier Feminism speak when it is mounted in public discourse? This paper considers some mechanisms by which this signifier generates and mobilizes desire, fantasy, and phobia in public politics where feminism’s knowledge product covers over or, in Rose’s terms, “sanitizes” those “disturbing insight[s]” (2014: x) of experience, “everything that is darkest, most recalcitrant and unsettling” (2014 xii), in the “furthest limits of conscious and unconscious life” (2014: x). Here, where this signifier constitutes an ideal-ego, its effects are inhibiting. In short, this paper argues that before any future of feminism can be imagined, those occupying a feminist position—discourse, politics, or identity—must ask what their unconscious investment in this signifier is. In Lacanian terms, one must relinquish feminism’s discourse of protest and complete the circuit through the analyst’s discourse to ask: what does a woman want in feminism? What does Feminism want