Goth women’s power comes from staging the refusal to be what male desire wants
Evidence
If the traditional problem for the male in pop culture has been dealing with a desire for the unattainable — for Lacan, remember, all desire is a desire for the unattainable — then the complementary difficulty for the female has been to come to terms with not being what the male wants. The Object knows that what she has does not correspond with what the subject lacks. … It is almost as if the female goth response to this dilemma is to self-consciously assume the role of the “cold, distanced, inhuman partner” (Žižek) of phallic desire. The glam male remains trapped in his perfect penthouse populated by dumb fantasmatic playdolls; the goth female meanwhile roams through the roles of vamp and vampire, succubus, automaton. The glam male’s pathologies are those of the subject; the goth female’s problematic is that of the object. … On the contrary, Siouxsie’s perversity was to make an art of her own objectification. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1036
Categorization
- SEED: Potential essay: the exhibitionist drive to be seen as a feminist aesthetic strategy, contrasting ‘being reduced to an object’ complaints with deliberate self-objectification.
- XREF: connects to: Audience misogyny targeted a female character who resisted rather than enabled the male lead — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 698; Men transform woman from flesh into an ethereal ideal, denying her body — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 383; The Muslim monster embodied repressed female sexual desire in Gothic fiction (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- The Muslim monster embodied repressed female sexual desire in Gothic fiction
#complicates(0.80) - Men transform woman from flesh into an ethereal ideal, denying her body
#qualifies(0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 383