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Operation “Castration” or: Castration as Plenitude
Jacques-Alain Miller, the grand arbiter of all things Lacan, has a short article on Sarah Palin’s “feminism.” Here’s an interesting quote:
What is the precise difference between the women of these two generations? The first ones imitated man, respected the phallus, and performed as if they had one. The second wave knows that the phallus is only a semblance and, furthermore, one not to be taken seriously: it is the de-complexified femininity. A Sarah Palin puts forward no lack: she fears nothing, churns out children all while holding a shotgun, and presents herself as an unstoppable force, “a pitbull with lipstick”.
There’s also a great response to this and several other discussions on the definition of “feminism” in our post-Palin political world over at Infinite Thought. IT writes:
It is clear, then, that we are not only dealing with ‘right’ and ‘left’ feminism, but with a fundamental crisis in the meaning of the word. If ‘feminism’ can mean anything from behaving like a man (Miller), being pro-choice (Valenti), being pro-life (Palin), and being pro-war (the Republican administration), then we may simply need to abandon the term, or at the very least, restrict its usage to those situations in which we make damn sure we explain what we mean by it.