Every Inch a Woman Sexuality Studies Series This series focuses on original, provocative, scholarly research examining from a range of perspectives the complexity of human sexual practice, identity, community, and desire. Books in the series explore how sexuality interacts with other aspects of society, such as law, education, feminism, racial diversity, the family, policing, sport, government, religion, mass media, medicine, and employment. The series provides a broad public venue for nurturing debate, cultivating talent, and expanding knowledge of human sexual expression, past and present. The members of the editorial board are: Barry Adam, Department of Sociology, University of Windsor Blye Frank, Department of Education, Mount Saint Vincent University Didi Khayatt, Faculty of Education, York University Philinda Masters, Resources for Feminist Research, OISE/University of Toronto Janice Ristock, Women’s Studies, University of Manitoba Becki Ross, Anthropology and Sociology, University of British Columbia Gamal Abdel-Shehid, Physical and Health Education, University of Alberta Tom Waugh, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University This is the second volume in the series. The first was Masculinities without Men? Female Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Fictions, by Jean Bobby Noble Carellin Brooks Every Inch a Woman: Phallic Possession, Femininity, and the Text © UBC Press 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), www.accesscopyright.ca. 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Canada on acid-free paper Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Brooks, Carellin Every inch a woman : phallic possession, femininity, and the text / Carellin Brooks. (Sexuality studies, ISSN 1706-9947) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7748-1209-2 ISBN-10: 0-7748-1209-5 1. Gender identity in literature. 2. Women in literature. 3. Penis in literature. 4. Femininity in literature. 5. Literature, Modern – 20th century – History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PN56.F4B76 2005 809'.93353 C2005-906054-9 UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and with the help of the K.D. Srivastava Fund. UBC Press The University of British Columbia 2029 West Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 604-822-5959 / Fax: 604-822-6083 www.ubcpress.ca Contents Acknowledgments / vi Preface / vii Introduction / ix 1 In Freud’s Case: Mothering the Phallus / 1 2 Literally Male: The Case Study / 34 3 The Body in the Text: All-seeing ‘I’s / 61 4 Mysterious, Solitary Women: The Butch Cipher / 89 5 Girl Cock: The Literalized Phallus / 114 6 Avalanche of Dildos: The Transferable Phallus / 138 7 The Power of the (W)hole / 164 Notes / 182 References / 194 Index / 198 Acknowledgments Thanks to Malcolm Bowie, Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, for his unfailing attention, unflagging faith, and unstinting advice. I would also like to thank Nic Williams, for the inspiration; Charles Boudreau, for telling me to put myself in; Chuck Bayliss, for keeping me from going mad; and Kestrel Barnes, for minding and reading. Preface It isn’t everyone who can say they got the idea for a book during sex. Fortu- nately my partner at the time took the abrupt cessation of our activities – I believe I shouted ‘That’s it!’ and summarily abandoned her to search franti- cally for a pen and some paper, the better to record my wonderful new idea – in good part. Oxford in 1993, where I first began my researches, was not so much un- kind to lonely homosexuals from the colonies as indifferent. I found the latter far more difficult to bear. When I complained of administrative ne- glect or pointlessly prolonged procedures, I was told, with unveiled con- tempt, that perhaps things were done differently ‘in America.’ My spluttering rejoinder that I was not American but Canadian cut no ice; my tormentor of the moment would say no more but would imply, with an eloquently insulting glance, that there was really no difference. If my researches were solitary, however, I found a home in the burgeon- ing London lesbian club scene. The first drag king contest in the UK was held in 1995, and I watched in wonder as a lesbian photographer who had made her name in pictures of shaven-headed, bare-chested dykes (and who was later to become a man) vamped across the stage in a dyed feather boa, platform shoes, and a baby tee that exposed her belly tattoo. The most memorable performance of the evening was given by a young person known as Hans. Hans shuffled onstage in a mouse-brown suit, carrying a book un- der one arm, an orange in his hand, and a coil of rope drooping from a pocket. Ignoring the audience, he stood on the book, arranged the noose around his neck, and put the orange in his mouth. As he pulled the rope taut, he went limp, his pants dropping to the floor. Underneath was a pair of flesh-coloured pantyhose looped at the crotch into the world’s tiniest penis. It was a virtuoso and avant-garde performance for that or any other time. Another inspired contestant from that night, Jewels, began his own weekly club in an old-tyme Soho drag joint. Soon I was cycling to Naïve on Saturday viii Preface nights in my getup of the moment, a vinyl micromini (purchased from the sex shop Ann Summers) that barely concealed an obscene, lolling black rubber dildo. Although the outfit made me feel more powerful than any- thing I’d ever worn before, it lacked practicality: I discovered almost imme- diately that it was impossible to sit on the saddle with a bulge that size between my legs. I have vivid memories of lurking in pee-soaked back al- leys, hastily stuffing an enormous member into my panties and praying no impressionable tourists would wander by. My choice of appendage was popu- lar, probably because it combined economy with effect; more than one lover since has possessed the same model. Déjà vu, indeed. Although I have explored the topic for more than a decade, both profes- sionally and personally, the penile woman continues to fascinate me. The ubiquity of the image and its continuing reappearance in popular and high culture attest to its richness as a trope and its promise for future researches. I, for one, feel that I have barely scratched the surface. Introduction The phallic woman is not a singular figure, nor is she one whose origins can be reliably traced. Though I locate her first in the imagined phallic mother theorized by Sigmund Freud, she is in a sense ageless because she multi- plies, turning up in all sorts of texts and guises. This book, in its turn, also multiplies, in the many different texts in which it seeks and locates the beguiling, undeniably seductive figure of the phallic woman. The divisions between these different narratives have of necessity been partly arbitrary, although they maintain a certain literal coherence. Furthermore, I restrict my investigations to her appearance in English- and European-language writings (mostly from Western Europe and North America) situated at the beginning and end of the twentieth century, and to various fictional and theoretical genres within those time, language, and geographical frames (including science fiction, reportage, and pornography). My survey is not in any way exhaustive. As a familiar cultural trope, the phallic woman – whether textually embodied as fantastical idea, crude joke, or figure of hor- ror – proliferates. This is part of her enduring fascination. Culturally and textually the idea of the phallic woman is an ancient one. Human beings, it is probably safe to say, have always thought about their sexuality, and their theorizing has invariably been sophisticated enough to encompass its fantastical forms. It is impossible that the various manifesta- tions of the phallic woman culturally familiar today – the woman who is actually a man, the woman who impersonates a man, the woman who appro- priates the penis in fantastical or plastic form, and so on – were unknown to past generations. Texts about the cross-dressing woman who passed as a man, even marrying another woman, were familiar and easily available to readers of the medieval era. The deployment of the dildo as penis substitute in pornographic narrative was not unknown even in Greek times, and it was common for anatomy texts from the seventeenth century onwards to make explicit and unremarkable reference to the vagina or the clitoris as x Introduction the female penis. Every Inch a Woman, however, does not look at these ear- lier instances of the phallic woman; instead, it is organized very specifically around two main points in time and in literature: (1) the constellation of theory and sex in European thought from the late nineteenth to the first third of the twentieth century, a moment exemplified by Freud’s theories on female sexuality and the role of the phallus, and (2) Western writings from the 1970s to the present, especially those from France, about female sexuality – fiction that explores the figure of the masculinized woman, and theories that posit new ways in which genders and sexualties can be pre- sented, inhabited, explored and, of course, enjoyed. What the Freudian text of the earlier time period, where my investigation begins, did for the first time was crystallize an imaginary moment and iden- tify a supposed lack in female identity. And what the sexology of the period, echoed by Freud, contributed was an insistence on desire and on sexuality itself as masculine, with a consequent identification of the desiring woman as male. Though the history of sexuality is littered with reference to the phallus and to female masculinity, Freud and his sexological forerunners were the first to attempt both a scientific quantification and a systematic unveiling of the mechanisms of perversion and, hence, apparently inevita- bly, of the phallicized woman. The writers and thinkers of the latter time period of my inquiry have distilled these influences, sometimes overtly and sometimes not, in writing about female sexuality and its relationship to the phallus. What the two endpoints of the twentieth century have in com- mon, very broadly speaking, is their relative proliferation of textual mate- rial, both literary and efficacious, dealing with various manifestations of the figure of woman-with-phallus. There are three factors unique to the last century that contribute the sheer volume of writing on masculinized feminine sexuality at both its beginning and end. The first is the explosion of writings during these time periods on and around the subject of the body and, more specifically, its sexual charac- teristics. People and societies have always written on these topics, of course, but earlier writings were generally restricted to a much smaller group of writers and readers. By comparison, the twentieth century has enjoyed a comparative flowering of both access to and production of writing on sexual matters. This writing has ranged from the ostensibly scientific (sexologist Krafft-Ebing’s measurements of his subjects’ pelvises and heads) to the un- abashedly pornographic (recently published and sexually explicit stories of frankly masculine women with priapuses to which they refer in impossibly biological terms). This range also reflects another notable characteristic of the twentieth century’s proliferation of writing on sexual matters: the con- comitant growth of writings by and on the subject of formerly unrepre- sented groups of people, particularly those marginalized by such differentiating factors as race, sexuality, economic position, and so on. This