Butch Lesbians in Turkey — Slavoj Žižek

Süheyb Öğüt’s comment “The Butch Lesbians and the HDPKK” is worth mentioning because it ridiculously misuses psychoanalysis not only in order to sustain traditional patriarchal ideology but also for Turkish daily politics – here is it:

“According to psychoanalysis every relationship is sexual. But this doesn’t mean that every relation in everyday life smells of sexuality. On the contrary, this means that in every relationship – whatever it is, political, social or economic – agents occupy a sexual position which is either the position of a man or that of a woman. Indeed, even if the type of relationship is not a conventional one but the one unusual for the majority of population, this rule is valid. It is exactly for this reason that even in ‘queer’ relations – like in heterosexual relations – there is a male (master, dominant) role and a female (servant, submissive) role which is enacted. Otherwise the relationship is an impossible one.

For example, the lesbians: Fundamentally there are two types of lesbians: butch (male role) and femme (female role). When we observe the butch lesbians, it seems impossible to distinguish them from males. Their body language (seating, walking, gestures, mimics, cloths, even their tatoos) is macho. They look very brave and good. They are much more aggressive and ‘if punch, knock down’ type of people than an average man. If you engage in a fight with a butch you should probably immediately run away. This macho ‘image’ is also enacted in their relationship with their partners: they are very dominant and they ask partners to behave towards them in a very submissive way. So when you observe this type of relationship, you notice the same phallic enjoyment as that of a man enjoying the submissiveness of his partner.

But in reality the situation is exactly the opposite one. Butch doesn’t occupy a position of phallic manhood, for sure. The macho-male mask – witnessing her symbolic castration – that she wears in everyday life doesn’t serve her to derive from it any sort of phallic enjoyment. It is rather the enjoyment of the Big Other which defines her macho manhood. This is because a butch lesbian is desperately obliged to use some artificial tool as the substitution for the real-natural organ that she lacks, and also because she waives her own pleasure in order to really possess her partner like a man would do. This kind of pleasure found in waiving her own bodily pleasure, a pleasure found in merely serving painfully the Other’s pleasure, corresponds to female enjoyment. Behind their macho appearances butches are therefore nothing but the usual obedient ‘good girls’. However, this situation of which they are unconsciously aware doesn’t disturb them much as long as they look macho from the view of the Other, as long as they can keep on hiding their ‘good girl’ in their inside.

Never mind, these HDP+PKK’s look like butches who act like a macho, challenging the State and the majority of people by way of using dildo-like external weapons. There is a ‘good girl’ woman behind this mask. There is a pathetic servant behind those who work for the Big Other’s enjoyment (of secularism, of Israel, of Kemalism. What, then, makes them endure the pain of masking their castrated submissive femme, of leaving behind their original ‘good girl’ femininity? Here is the answer, the same as the butch lesbian’s answer: they endure the pain in order to be able to be seen and approved as a disobedient (leftist) and roughneck (secular) master by the Big Other. That’s it.” (metin)

This brief comment, a theoretical and political nightmare, enacts a blatant misuse of Lacanian psychoanalysis: it offers sexual difference in the traditional sense (master and servant, active and passive…) as a framework which defines the specific agencies “for manhood and for womanhood,” and then universalizes it as a model for all human relations, “political, social or economic“; even when a sexual relation is not the standard one, as is the case with lesbians, there has to be the dominant masculine position and the submissive feminine position (butch and femme). This framework is supposed to function as a kind of formal a priori, a condition of possibility, of any relationship – “otherwise the relationship is an impossible one”… but Lacan’s point is precisely this one, namely that sexual relationship IS an impossible one, il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel. Every other (not directly sexual) interhuman relation can be sexualized precisely because “there is no sexual relationship: sexuality affects other domains not because of its overpowering strength but because of its weakness. For Lacan, “there is no sexual relationship” means (among other things) precisely that no symbolic opposition (like active-passive, master/servant, etc.) can adequately determine sexual difference.

Things then take an even worse turn: a lesbian relationship is explained in the terms of the opposition between “natural-real” sexual organ (penis) and artificial external dildo: butch lesbians lack real penis, so they have to rely on the are artificial dildo in order to impress some figure of the big Other (their Ego Ideal) with their masculinity. One should also note the political dimension of Öğüt’s text: written in order to support the official policy of the Turkish government (which denounces Kurdish opposition as terrorists), it is meant to slander one of the greatest moments of Kurdish struggle in Syria, the women-fighters who proved to be very efficient against ISIS. The idea is that these women-fighters are like butch lesbians: they fake their masculinity by way of displaying their dildos (masculine guns) in order to impress the figure of their Zionist-secular (i.e., anti-Turkish) big Other… there is a slight problem here. For Lacan, phallus (which defines masculinity) is not the penis but a signifier, the signifier of castration, which means precisely an external supplement, “structured like a dildo” (to paraphrase Lacan’s famous formula “the unconscious is structured like a language”). So the situation described by Öğüt as a lesbian diversion is for Lacan a normal one: what defines the masculinity of a man is not his possession of penis but the way he relates to some external phallic signifier on which his authority relies, and he does this in order to be noted by a figure of big Other which confers on him his authority.

Consequently, would Öğüt be ready to say that Erdoğan is also a butch, a weak guy who displays his dildo secret police in order to impress the big Other (Turkey, Islam)? If this is disrespectful, then he should have the decency not to make similar humiliating remarks about Kurds fighting the Islamic State.

Not: Süheyb Öğüt’ün psikanaliz istismarı hakkındaki bu metni Slavoj Žižek hazırlayıp “Cumhuriyet” adını taşıyan ulusal süreli yayına gönderdi. “Cumhuriyet” adını taşıyan ulusal süreli yayın ise Encore Yayımlarının yayımlayacağı “Antigone” adını taşıyan kitabına reklam malzemesi yaparak bu yazıyı yedi (“malzemeyi yazıya yedirmek”). Yenik yazının özellikle sonunda Slavoj Žižek’in Süheyb Öğüt’e “saygısız herif edepli olsana!” dedirtildiği kısımlar Türkçe çeviriye dair ciddi kuşku uyandırdı. Yazının başlığındaki “Žižek Öğüt’e dersini verdi!” vurgusu da bu kuşkuya ciddi katkılarda bulundu. Konuyla ilgili e-postama yanıt veren Slavoj Žižek İngilizce metni bana göndererek “tam metnin bir sitede yayınlanacağını” söyledi (ki yazıda “have decency” demiş, “saygılı edepli ol” falan dememiş; ayrıca bkz sendika.org).

Tam metni yayınlayacak herhangi başka bir site ufukta gözükmediğine göre “mevzubahis site neden bu site olmasın” diyerek İngilizce metni yayınlıyorum. Bu vesileyle Fizik dünyasının ~Yerçekimi Dalgaları~ keşfini kutluyor ve emeği geçen bilim emekçilerini selamlıyorum. Yapılan keşfin asıl kıymeti kavranacaksa dikkatlerini gözlemlenen olayın kendisinden (iki karadeliğin çarpışmasıyla yayılan dalgalar) bu olayı gözlemleyebilmiş örgütlü bilim-medya kompleksine doğru kaydırmaları gerekiyor. Enformasyon, tanımlanan bir şey değildir, tanımlama işleminin kendisidir. Bilimsel bakış açısının bu kaymayı gerçekleştirerek kendi kendisini hesaba katabilmesi için (Hiçten Az‘da kurulan olumsallık-gereklilik diyalektiği gibi) bir izafiyet-mutlaklık diyalektiğine ihtiyacı var.