ABSTRACT
In 1978, addressing the Midwestern Division of the Society for Women in Philosophy, feminist theorist Sarah Hoagland posited that the category of the lesbian falls outside the conceptual scheme of Western phallocracies. Such a position of nonexistence, she argued, provides the lesbian subject with a “singular vantage point with respect to the reality which does not include her,” giving her “access to knowledge which is inaccessible to those whose existence is countenanced by the system.” 1 By invoking the lesbians cultural invisibility as a site of epistemic privilege, Hoagland underscores the central role of the specular metaphor in the discourse of Western epistemology; as has often been pointed out, the very term “theory” adequately reflects the ontological weight our culture traditionally attributes to the powers of vision. However, paraphrasing the Russian philosopher/linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, we could say that within the system of Western metaphysics, what can be known is only that which can be seen. If lesbian sexuality is not being “countenanced” by the general scheme of things, how is it that such invisibility, or “unknowability,” can yet be argued to generate enhanced powers of vision with regard to that culture? Moreover, and perhaps even more pertinently in this context, the assumed connection between being and seeing alerts us to the crucial role of specularity in the Freudian account of sexuality, in which the perceivable absence or presence of a penis constitutes the mark of sexual difference, the founding structure of both subjective and objective reality. If its ontological “impossibility” renders lesbian sexuality culturally invisible, what could be the function of such a nonconcept in the unconscious subtext underlying the collective imagination that makes up these “realities”?
