Siouxsie’s drag reappropriated male specular desire staged by Roxy Music

Evidence

But glam had been the preserve of male desire: what would its drag look like when worn by a woman? This was a particularly fascinating inversion when we consider that Siouxsie’s most significant resource was not the serial identity sexual ambivalence of Bowie but the staging of male desire in Roxy Music. She may have hung out with “Bowie boys”, but Siouxsie seemed to borrow much more from the lustrous PVC blackness of For Your Pleasure than from anything in the Thin White Duke’s wardrobe. For Your Pleasure songs like “Beauty Queen” and “Editions of You” were self-diagnoses of a male malady, a specular desire that fixates on female objects that it knows can never satisfy it. Although she “makes his starry eyes shiver”, Ferry knows “it never would work out”. This is the logic of Lacanian desire, which Alenka Zupančič explains as follows: “The […] interval or gap introduced by desire is always the imaginary other, Lacan’s petit objet a, whereas the Real (Other) of desire remains unattainable. The Real of desire is jouissance — that ‘inhuman partner’ (as Lacan calls it) that desire aims at beyond its object, and that must remain inaccessible.” — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1034

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sources the Lacanian distinction between petit objet a (the imaginary gap-object of desire) and jouissance (the unattainable Real of desire) through Zupančič’s gloss.
• XREF: connects to: Roxy Music dramatized phallic desire as fundamentally masturbatory — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1035

Broader Connections

• Roxy Music dramatized phallic desire as fundamentally masturbatory #qualifies (0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1035