Heads Freud, Tails Lacan: The Question of Feminine Perversion

Abstract

Starting with the paternal imposition of a fetish on women, clothes and jewellery that have the function of protecting them from other men, Gérard Pommier suggests that this move is implicated in Lacan’s term ‘père-version’. He asks then whether there is a form of père-version for a woman? Taking the example of the Christian mystics, whose orgasm was witnessed by the Church and transcribed by artists, he asks whether jouissance is in the suffering itself or rather in its transcription? His response is that the jouissance of suffering depends on the presence of the voyeur, and that this might characterize the sexual jouissance not only of mystics. Just as radically, he examines the way in which motherhood offers the possibility for female perversion through the fetishization of the child.