Lacan and Postfeminism

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Jacques Lacan has been acknowledged as one of the giants of psychoanalysis, whose influence has spread far from the clinical psychology that his theories were rooted in, to become a touch point in English, social science, philosophy and perhaps most radically, feminism. Moreover, his key work on the constitution of identity and the recognition of self have enabled feminism to move with the times and adapt its theories to a new political climate. Nominal equality at least may have largely been achieved for many women in the western world - but the old questions still haunt the thinking of gender relations, and require fresh input if trenchant criticism is to remain alive.
About the Author
Elizabeth Wright, who died in June 2000, was a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, editor of "Feminism and Psychoanalysis", and a practising psychoanalyst.
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Most definitions of postfeminism begin by piously asserting what it does not mean, that feminism is 'post' in the sense of past. Rather, the issue is one of a strategic move made by feminism: as a consequence of wanting women to band together collectively, feminists neglected the critique of a positive and stable identity. They relied on a stable concept of what a woman was, which led to 'essentialist' dilemmas, instead of subjecting 'woman' to critical analysis. Here they ignored that element in poststructuralism which focused on the ideological constructions of discourse.

Poststructuralism reacted against the binary oppositions of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's theory , in that it concentrated on discourse, in what happens in dialogue, rather than on language, what is in the dictionary. Saussure introduced the terms 'signifier' and 'signified' as two elements of the sign: the signifier is the sound image of a word, and the signifier the concept corresponding to it. In itself this suggests a somewhat rigid conception of language, particularly since Saussure saw signifiers and signified connected as the two sides of a single sheet of paper. Since he saw signifiers, the sound-units of language, as related to each other in a fixed structure of differences, he inevitably conceived of the concepts, the thoughts that they represented as equally fixed. Here he was inconsistent, since elsewhere in his theory he acknowledged that language changed as it was used in actual speech, but he had no explanation of how change could come about. Lacan, to the contrary, gives primacy to the signifier, arguing that the signified (meaning) is an effect of the play of signifiers over the continuum of experience, which Saussure left out of account. This view returns speech to its proper place in the construction of language whereas Saussure, in stressing the structure of language, could not help but foreground the social at the expense of the human beings who spoke. For the moment, so much in a nutshell. Without this structural theory 'deconstruction' and its critique of the text, and ultimately of the subject, could never have taken place.