3:The Indominable Gaze of the Other

The Male Gaze 

The cartel prepared themselves to enter the house with the propitious sign of extensive ant colonies on its left-hand side. Julien said that it was a good sign. As she had become more and more open to signs, the world was beginning to speak to her through various means and methods. Today it was ants. Whatever, Julien pronounced to the group, there was generally an unquestioning assent. This one was a little different though. She seemed to have taken a step into some other place, some elsewhere that they couldn’t see, but they would follow her anywhere.  

The house looked like any of the other abandoned and rotting ones on the block. But this one had ant colonies on its left-hand side, which were not uncommon in the zone, but signs are always written in the natural elements of the quotidian. Signs contain instructions but also ambiguity, or what Information Theory calls “noise.” Julien was clear that they should go into the house, but she was not clear about what they’d find in there. Perhaps, she would find the ritual space needed to house the feminine phallus. Was the zone speaking in alignment with the cartel’s quest for imminent transcendence, or had the feminine phallus been the zone’s plan all along? Perhaps, the cartel and the zone were coming into some greater alignment through their ongoing dialectic together.  

“But what about the ‘Male Gaze?’” Gabriel ejaculated in a low but forceful rumble. It startled the group. They had been readying themselves to penetrate a house that might be the location of their new ritual space, outside of the Pervert’s Gaze, but as with any of the other abandoned-looking houses in the zone, it also might be concealing an armed recluse inside. So, they were kind of amped up and not really prepared for what seemed like the sudden non-sequitur from Gabriel. Gabriel was somewhere on a spectrum, as they all were, but no one was sure which spectrum any of them were on, and the cartel was trying to avoid labelling anyone with the categories of their previous lives, especially those of the “psychological industrial complex.”  

Mariam, who was the kindest of the rough association, politely asked, “Could you, please, explain what you mean, Gabriel?”  

Gabriel pulled her long black hair out of her black, mascaraed eyes with both hands; however, not to make eye contact with Miriam, or anybody else, but, apparently, to see the ground more clearly. “The males will bring the Male Gaze into the vaginal sanctum with us,” she rumbled, but now more slowly. 

“Yes, but the point is to return the gaze from Laura Mulvany’s ‘Male Gaze’ to Jacques Lacan’s ‘Gaze.’ There was no mastery in Lacan’s Gaze. No mastery,” Mariam repeated emphatically while making a forceful, karate-chop gesture to her forearm. She was agitated in a way that the cartel hadn’t seen before. 

Mariam was very good with “Critical Theory” and had been teaching the cartel about how the film theorist Laura Mulvany had thought that she was applying Lacan’s “Gaze” to the masculine viewpoint of the camera in movies, but how she actually had invented a new theory of the “Male Gaze” to describe “pervert filmmakers' presentations of women on the screen.” Whatever categories from the previous world they wished to discard, their new ways of being included a lot of theory from the former.  

Mariam stirringly continued, “The ‘Male Gaze’ is the gaze of what is thought to be for the one in the male position.” As Mariam talked, she became overstated but exact with her hands and with her pauses. She clearly understood that self-expression was about “the spaces in between the notes.” She had enunciated the word “for” particularly conspicuously with an additional karate chop to her forearm, and then, after a musical silence, completed the pronouncement. Then Mariam stood there looking sagacious in her over-sized black glasses, and her pink, floral dress, which barely covered her abundant bosoms or much else of her sun-olived flesh, as might have been taken in by a pruriently motivated camera’s lens had this been a film. 

They were all wearing floral summer dresses. And they only felt ridiculous when they thought of how they would have been seen before the exodus. The gaze of those others was gone now, but it lingered on as one of the voices in their heads. The dresses were all quite bright and quite revealing, except for Gabriel’s because she wore a long, black, linen one covering her entirely. It wasn’t a sundress. She said that she was embarrassed about her “man legs and arms,” which is a good example of how the gaze of the previous occupants of the zone lingered as a voice in her head.  

Michael’s dress was particularly revealing because he was six, six and a little over three hundred pounds, and because cute, summer dresses were hard to find in his size, especially since one had to be found among what had been left in the closets of the abandoned houses. Perhaps, his summer dress had once been a muumuu for a large but short person, and Michael wasn’t short. Michael had decided to keep his masculine pronouns because he wanted to preserve his sense of being without the vagina and not because he had a penis. He had said to the others, “I want the presence of my penis to present the absence of the vagina,” because he thought this formulation demonstrated his grasp of complex theory beyond that of the others.   

For Michael to gender himself as masculine meant that he lacked the phallus since for the cartel, the vagina was the phallus, but what he hadn’t entirely grasped was that when the intention for the phallus to become the vagina was announced, the meaning of the phallus was being changed from having to not having. Could the “having” of the penis signify the “not-having” of the vagina after “not-having” became the “having” of the phallus? In the brave, new world that the cartel indented to ingress, the phallus was to signify “lack,” so that having it would mean “lacking.” Michael indented to lack the phallus because he had a penis. He had theorized that even when the penis was an erect presence within the vulva, it could not fill the feminine gap, so that the penis would present the absence of the phallus to the vagina, which caused Gabriel to accuse Michael of “Making the penis more of a vagina than a vagina.” However, Michael continued to insist that the penis’s gift to the feminine gap was no longer a positive presence, but rather, more vacuity, or more “not-having,” as he felt putting it that way sounded more mystical. 

Michael wanted to resume group sex. The Church imposed curse of impotency had been particularly difficult for him. His softness was hard. He had told their flaccid conglomerate that, “Sexual congress could be called to order once the void within the vaginal canal had been installed as the true phallus because then the penis, no longer the phallus, would enter without giving anything to the vagina,” which had always been the case except for those “males” who imagined themselves as “non-lacking” or “uncastrated” in the psychoanalytical sense.  

Gabriel thought that Michael’s logic was transparently self-interested, but Michael believed that in the forthcoming liturgy’s aftermath, “coitus” would be more like a “discourse” about “absence” between the penis and the vagina rather than about possessing the phallus. In discourse, the speaker only held the phallus tentatively and then passed it, so that there could be something like mutual penetration, and / or, possibly, mutual subsumption. Penetrating each other with lack would be something like having a dialectic with the void, Michael thought. Since the phallus now signified “lack,” he told the others that penetration meant penetrating with what one doesn’t have, so that the vagina and penis were both presenting lack to each other in the discourse of the new intercourse. Nobody was really sure if that made sense, so Julien said that they’d continue to think about it. 

And to further prove his theoretic acumen, he told the group that this was the proper interpretation of Lacan’s aphorism, “Love is giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it,” apparently unaware that there might be other ways to interpret Lacan that would not be helpful to his project of reintroducing penetration to their sex cult. He admitted that he didn’t entirely understand Jacques Derrida’s theory of “logocentrism,” which Mariam had been trying to explain to the cartel for the last couple of weeks. But he understood that it mistakenly privileged presence over absence, and that switching the privileged position to absence, meant making the vagina the phallus, and that now that the penis wasn’t the phallus, it also signified absence, so that sex was more like inserting an absence into an absence, which might have been what Pseudo-Dionysus had meant by “super-saturated void,” sometimes translated as “super-substantial.” However, he was still working on a theory to relate this doubling of absences to GFW Hegel’s dialectical double negation, so that a more eloquent articulation of their erotic proceedings might be established according to the structure of Hegelian intercourse. 

As has already been noted, because it was often noted by Gabriel, Gabriel vehemently disagreed with Michael’s obviously motived reasoning and had gotten “ad hominine” with Michael about it because Gabriel thought that Michael just wanted to insert his penis into that particularly warm void again. Gabriel had changed her pronouns to feminine ones to be in line with the “historical” position of lack, but she wasn’t going to change her name to “Gabriella. She wanted “Gabriel” to become one of those ambidextrous names that could be used either way like “Stacy,” or like “de-gendered,” common nouns such as “actor,” but she thought differently about pronouns. She thought specifically that “she” shouldn’t be neutered like a common noun, so that “she” might keep a trace of historical gender. Even after gender had been stripped of its historic denotation, Gabriel wanted “she’s” historic connotations to linger.  

Because Gabriel had a penis but intended a vagina, she felt that she was in the classic position of feminine “lack,” which got dangerously close to what she accused Michael of, which was that “He was making the penis more of a vagina than the vagina.” Gabriel explained that Michael intended for his penis to be some sort of “over-vagina,” but that her penis was counter to Gabriel’s desire for a physical vagina, so that her penis produced the tension of irreducible ambiguity. The mismatch between Gabriel’s feminine intentions and her masculine appearance produced her excessive singularity from her lack of symbolic interpolation. Gabriel rejected the gendering intentions of “the Big Other” to engender indeterminacy. She enjoyed this ambiguity of gender, not as pleasurable but rather as the excessive enjoyment, or jouissance, of the process of indeterminate differentiation, which occasioned her as something both novel and unreadable.  

Gabriel said in her deep, deliberate monotone, “There are those among us who still consider themselves to be in the masculine position. We will be constructing and then perusing an artful vagina. And the males will be gazing at the vagina from the masculine position. Classic male gaze bullshit.”  

Gabriel was still looking down but visibly shaking. She was, of course, referring to the giant vagina diorama that they had been discussing building. It would represent the feminine phallus for their ritual practices.  

“Yes, but it’ll be non-figurative, so they won’t be fucking it with their eyes, or any other way,” Julien said as crassly as she could. “We will all be gazing into its abstract mystery rather than imagining a dick cumming into it.” She had become frustrated with Gabriel’s “rigidity,” especially since it seemed to contradict Gabriel’s constant preaching of “irreducible ambiguity.”  

“Whatever it is, as long as there are males present, it will still be something for the male gaze,” Gabriel said emphasizing the word “for” again as her muscular biceps and chest flexed uncontrollably with anger. 

“Yes, but the void within the vulva stares back, and swallows whatever structure projects itself into it,” Julien continued.  

“Yes,” Mariam agreed interrupting Julien but to reinforce her point, “The males will feel that they are somehow for it.” She then paused to admire that turn of phrase. 

Julien then continued her intervention of Gabriel’s beef, “And I think that there is some confusion between a male and the male position here. It’s possible to be a male and not be in the male position if the male doesn’t disavow his castration. Vaginal sex has always been a sort of castration that has terrified males into ridiculous overcompensations, including, but not limited to, driving unnecessarily gigantic trucks, sexual entitlement, Alpha Males influencers, hallucinating that their penises are pleasure delivery devices, and misogyny in general. One can have a penis without having the phallus if he, or she, recognizes that the penis is not giving the phallus to the vagina but that the vagina is giving the phallus to the penis. The penis receives the phallus from the vagina without obtaining it because its reception is the covering of the penis in vaginal darkness, which absents the penis from the scene of feminine intercourse. Look, it might be something that we can’t clarify right now. Let’s just see if this house might be a suitable home for our abstract vagina phallus. And then...” 

“The height of the liturgy is supposed to be each of us solemnly processing through the labia into the dark vulvic region...”. Gabriel had finally looked up to angrily interrupt Julien and then was just as quickly interrupted by a classical expletive that had not been quite de-neutered yet. 

“Fuck!” screamed Michael. Everyone froze. “There’s someone in the window!” He abruptly shifted to some sort of theatrical whisper, “Get down.” Everyone dove into the tall grass. Their short summer dresses weren’t really made for face first dives into the dirt, nor for the rough, overgrown grasses and compacted dirt of the hard, uneven ground. Their dresses rode up over their swimming suit areas exposing their nether regions uncomfortably to the rough, overgrown grasses. Only Gabriel’s privacy was protected. Gabriel grinned at how the rest of their immodesty had made their nether regions so vulnerable. Their suffering made her grin for a moment despite the shooting terror in her guts.  

Michael got up from his belly into a crouch and then tried to see what was moving in the window without exposing himself too much. He homed in on the motion in the window while keeping his head within the thick, tall grass. Whatever it was, it flowed like bright yellow, satin fabric. It wasn’t a paranoid recluse wearing a yellow, summer dress. It was the flag of the Vatican. 

“God, damn it!” Ishmael screamed when Michael pointed it out to the group, “They’ve been here.” Ishmael stood up and ran through the tall grass and then vaulted onto the porch in a single bound; at which point, he manically leaped at the door feet first without checking to see if it was unlocked. In fact, the door was invisibly ajar, and as he kung foo-ed open the unresistant barrier to the threshold, Ishmael’s red summer dress flew up over his swimsuit area exposing his flaccid nether regions. His body made a fleshy thud as it hit the floor somewhere on the other side of the darkness of the portal. The door hit him hard on his scudded haunches when it instantaneously rebounded into his nakedness.  

The others stood up to get a better view of Ishmael’s madness. They saw the satiny, yellow flow ripped out of the first floor, bay window and could sort of make out Ishmael’s muffled rant about the Church’s perverted intrusion into this world that he had hoped to free of the male gaze. 

And then Ishmael screamed, “The void rules here! Not the phallus, you Peeping-Tom fucks.”