Let's Get it Together, Ladies

Reading Walkowitz’s essay “City of Dreadful Delight,” which paired quite nicely with last week’s Wilson reading, brought to mind the Lacanian theory of the “other” and its connection to the eroticizing of low culture. Walkowitz quotes critics Stallybrass and White, who offer a culturally symbolic explanation for the “low-other” fetish:

“The top attempts to reject and eliminate the bottom for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover not only that it is in some way frequently dependent on the low-other, but also that the top includes that low symbolically as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity.”

This image of subject, feared and desired, is so relevant, as it applies to any sort of prejudice that we as observers connect to the unfamiliar. In more conspicuous instances, the thought of race and race relations applies. America has had a history (and some may argue that is still exists today) of eroticizing the non-white subject, particularly women of African, Asian, or Hispanic descent, and fetishizing them only for their physical unfamiliarity. They not only pose a potential political threat, but they also become symbols of sexualized idolatry. Walkowitz applies this theory to the Victorian prostitute, noting the binary between “domesticated feminine virtue” and the “public symbol of female vice,” a culturally reinforced separation.

The fact that bourgeois men and women became so invested in the investigation of prostitution implies its fetish, the feverish need to know and consume the subjects in question. Certainly this implication also highlights the Victorian habit of sexual repression, and it seems to subjugate all working women as degenerate, lowly others, threats to moral society. Of course, with fluctuations and fragmentations of the “readable” city comes the changing of idealized thinking (a throwback to Wilson’s “Invisible Flaneur”), and multitudes of marginalized personalities begin to inhabit the space between the morally good and despicably bad. Despite the changing politics though, women still get the short end of the stick.

Female identity remains a generalized idea. Even though we’ve moved centuries away from being compared to societal plagues, that underlying notion of subjectivity continues to permeate cultural thinking. It’s a shame too, because it even exists within female circles – we shame each other for sexual expression, body image, etc., yet we simultaneously disapprove of those going against idealistic forms of female beauty and self-expression. This is a huge roadblock for society in general. I ask, why have we moved forward in so many ways for equal rights, when we continue to adhere to archaic forms of Lacanian thinking? Can we ever get over ourselves, girls?