ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I return to popular Greek and Christian mythology, which has influenced both psychoanalytic and feminist scholarship. Specifically, I look at the myths of Medusa, the Sphinx, and Oedipus and the sirens in The Odyssey, as well as the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible, with special consideration of the inclusion/removal of Lilith from the canonical revisions of the Bible. These stories contain within them questions about sexual difference, specifically what a type of woman may want, and more importantly, what does not constitute their desire. Though I explicitly state that I do not intend to assume a Lacanian subject in a pre-Modern era, I emphasize the ways in which the question of what does a woman want may have circulated long before Freud articulated it. From here, I consider the lives of actual women during the 14th and 15th century who were affected by the popular adherence to these stories and myths, especially those in the Bible. In particular, I focus on the Spanish Inquisition and the persecution of women as witches and juxtapose that with the lives and practices toward the saints, specifically Saint Teresa of Avila, as a means to consider how ideas about feminine jouissance could inform practices toward women. I then turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-woman as a means to discuss the ways in which these women transgress Lacan’s name of the father, or the paternal law, and thus the primacy of the phallus. These transgressions allow for a moment when phallic organization fails and, though anxiety provoking, subjectivity can be altered slightly to allow for this displacement of the phallus.
