What is a Woman?: On Reading the Binary Patriarchal Social System Code.

Laura Mulvey (excerpts):

The paradox of phallocentrism (penis=power or its' lack) in all its' manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its' world. An idea of woman stands as linchpin to the system; it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence; it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies. Recent writing in "Screen" about psychoanalysis brought out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else. To summarize briefly: the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold; the first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic [...] She turns her child (penis-baby) into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis* (the condition, the imagines, of entry into the symbolic).

[*"In the girl's Oedipal scenarios, the father, unlike the castrated mother, stands for the virile capacity of desire itself, which she herself lacks but might reclaim through another man's provision of the opportunity to have a child." - Emily Zakin]

Once this has been achieved [i.e. having a child], her meaning in the process is at an end; it does not last into the world of law and language (symbolic order) except as a memory which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Either [the woman] must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the father and the Law [i.e. in the symbolic domain**], or else struggle to keep her child (penis-baby) down with her in the half-light of the imaginary.

[**Social structure defined through difference: Fear of castration (men); Search for plenitude (women)]

Woman's desire is subjugated to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can only exist in relation to castration and cannot transcend it [...] Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier*** for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

[***signifier: a sign's physical form (such as a sound, printed word, or image) as distinct from its' meaning. The single condition which characterizes something as a signifier, for Lacan, is that it is inscribed in a system in which it takes on value purely by virtue of its' difference from other elements in the system (This is the essence of structuralism and structural linguistics).]

The idea of woman takes on value in the system of binary gender relations purely by virtue of her anatomical difference from man [man= without lack; woman= with lack][a Binary system 1/0 where the idea of "evil" takes on value in the system of binary relations purely by virtue of its' difference from "good". Good=1=without lack AND Evil=0=lack] This is how psychanalytic structures work. [The idea of "dark" takes on value in the system of binary relations purely by virtue of its' difference from light. LIGHT=1=without lack; DARK=0=lack]