Response 3: Cixous' Castration or Decapitation?

            The story of the decapitation of wives of the king for being disobedient to the order of Sun Tse shows that men do have power to shut the women’s mouth. In the story,  the wives were beheaded after refusing to follow Sun Tse’s instruction They kept on laughing instead of doing what they are told to so Sun Tse decided to decapitate them to shut them up. This shows that the decapitation takes women’s ability to speak. Sun Tse cut their heads thus they don’t have any power to speak anymore. Being decapitated means women lose their head, power, and identity, all at once. Decapitation is used for women instead of castration for the lack of phallus in their bodies. Phallus itself is the symbol of men’s masculinity and somehow it gives them power to ‘decapitate’ women. So the question is, can it work the other way? Can women castrate men? Cixous then mention about men’s anxiety of being castrated.

“What's so frightening in relations between male and female at the moment of coming (au niveau de La jouissance) is the possibility that there might be more on one side than on the other and the Symbolic finds it really tough to know who wins and who loses, who gives more in a relationship of this sort.” (p.7)

            This shows that men are somehow afraid of being castrated. They are anxious about the fact that women might have the ability to cut their power, that women could possibly more powerful than they are. They do realize that women do have ability to be the dominant one. If they think that way, doesn’t that instantly make women the more powerful one as men have that kind of anxiety?

            Cixous also mentioned the idea of women’s failure to show their feminity in their writing. I am actually kind of confused of this idea. What makes the writing feminine after all? When the women writes, that means they are trying to speak, they are trying to show their power. So, is it the fact that they are trying to show their power through their writing that makes their writing masculine? Because power is always men’s? Well, Cixous also stated that women, for men, is death. So their writings doesn’t necessarily reflect their own ideas or knowledge. Because the one with knowledge has power, and women don’t have power, thus they don’t have knowledge. it’s men’s knowledge that they write.

            However, I am fully disagree with that idea. It is true that one’s gender will affect the way one writes, but that doesn’t necessarily make women writing masculine, no? How do people decide whether one’s writing is feminine or masculine? That just confuses me. If they are so sure of such idea, doesn’t that mean they are just in denial for being so resistance to the fact that women do have knowledge? Spivak’s Can The Subaltern Speak also mentioned about intellectual being the deciding factor of one’s position in society, and that women’s position in society is lower than the subaltern, and the subaltern themselves are already the inferior one of society. So that means, women are the inferior of the inferior. Well..

            Now, back to the problem of women’s lack of phallus. The fact that men have phallus means they have the power to penetrate women, they have sperm which is an essential factor in producing another human being. What a power... they thought. However, I just can’t help but point out that the sperm cannot just transform into zygote by itself without fertilizing the egg cell, which is women’s. Moreover, I also can’t help but point out that women are the ones that suffer more. They carry another human being in their stomach for 9 months, sacrificing their life in delivering the baby to the world, but still, they have no phallus, thus, they have no power.

“And she is outside the Symbolic because she lacks any relation to the phallus, because she does not enjoy what orders masculinity—the castration complex.”

Until this point, where I am almost done with my response, I still don’t get the idea of men’s genital being the reason of their superiority. I probably never will understand and no matter what, there will always be people who deny the fact that women already have power over men as men have anxiety of losing their power. Women will always be the one that are being ordered, even in my religion, once a woman is married, she is obliged to follow her husband’s every will. She is not allowed to do what she wanted to do if her husband didn’t give her permission to do so. People value men more. However, this response is like my trying to show that despite my lack of phallus, I can speak and voice my thoughts. So, let’s just appreciate each other’s presence instead of problematizing our genital organs. Women and men need and complete each other so I don’t agree with the idea of one being more superior than the other.

Works Cited:

Cixous, Helene. “Castration or Decapitation?” Signs Vol. 7, No. 1. The University of Chicago Press, 1981. Page 24.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: Macmillan, 1988.