the bride is back: fall into the gap

Music: David Sylvian: Secrets of the Beehive One of the most refreshing and disturbing aspects of Zizek's writing is its (seemingly) fearless capacity to name the unnamable. Zizek is not shy about discussing his capacity for misogyny (and our own regardless of "sex"), often holding up a mirror. Reading the Albuquerque Police Department offense report filed about Jennifer Wilbanks abduction fantasy and her subsequent confession that it was just that, a fantasy, I was reminded of a passage by Zizek that startled and disturbed me some years ago. In order to demonstrate the "fantasmic support" of our "everyday symbolic universe" (that is, in order to explain how fantasy keeps us from going insane), Zizek outlines a homology between a scene from Lynch's Wild at Heart (a scene when William Dafoe sexually assaults Laura Dern, demanding that she say, "say fuck me!") and an Old South lynching. "The traumatic impact of these two scenes," he says, "relies on the gap between the subject's everyday symbolic universe and its fantasmic support." This "gap" is perhaps better understood, he continues,

through another disturbing phenomenon. When attention is drawn to the fact that women often do fantasize about being handled brutally and raped, the standard answer to it is either that this is a male fantasy about women or that women only have such fantasies in so far as they have "internalized" the patriarchal libidinal economy and endorsed their victimization. The underlying idea is that the moment we recognize this fact of day-dreaming about rape, we open the door to male-chauvinist platitudes about how, in being raped, women only get what they secretly wanted; their shock and fear only express the fact that they were not honest enough to acknowledge this. To this commonplace, one should answer that (some) women actually may day-dream about being raped, but this fact in no way legitimizes the actual rape, it makes it even more violent. Consider two women, the first, liberated and assertive, active; the other, secretly day-dreaming about being brutally handled by her partner, even raped. The crucial point is that, if both of them are raped, the rape will be much more traumatic for the second one, on account of the very fact that it will realize in "external" social reality the "stuff of her dreams." Perhaps a better way to put it would be to paraphrase yet again the immortal lines of Stalin: it is impossible to say which of the two rapes would be worse. ("Fantasy as a Political Category," in the Zizek Reader, pp. 96-97)

Well, one cannot accuse Zizek of beating around the bush in this passage, or, more precisely, one can accuse him of beating it almost to death. There is as much to say about Zizek's subjective symbolic universe as there is his point. Nevertheless, his point is that in either "case," a kind of violence ruptures the illusions that sustain us. Rape fantasy is a fantasy but is rooted in the symbolic; what the "actual" rape discloses is the impossibility of integrating one's symbolic existence with what is fleeting felt as "I"—the essence. No matter how wildly or genuinely perverse one's fantasy life may be, the point is that as an event, the violation of rape is a confrontation with impossibility and meaninglessness, the unraveling of symbolic safety. The "object" (although it's not really the object) or that which fantasy ultimately stages is not transgression, but the law itself, negatude, the power of "no" itself. Zizek reminds us that in Freudo-speak, ultimately fantasy stages the scene of castration, the "symbolic cut."

So why is rape fantasy so overdetermined? Lets consider our Runaway Bride's story: she was abducted by a dumpy white woman and a mid-sized Hispanic with "bad teeth." They bound her and drove for thirty minutes. Then, as the man was still driving, the woman removed Wilbank's and her own pants, and proceeded to eat-out Wilbanks. Then, she demanded Wilbanks eat her out as the man parked the van, moved to the back, and penetrated her. Wilbanks continued servicing the woman until the abductor reached orgasm, the man withdrew, everyone put their drawers back on, and they rode on. It turns out the abductors were characters based on a couple Wilbanks met on a bus to Austin.

In part, the fantasy is overdetermined for the reasons that I discussed in a previous post: Wilbanks created the classically hysterical scenario of identifying with the desire of the Other. The report itself only proves my point: what is a more clichéd hetero-male fantasy than two chicks licking each other's "clits" (the slang is part of the fantasy—and I'm trying not to be misogynistic here while acknowledging my misogyny; like every subject born into This American Symbolic, we're taught to love/hate the Other from the get-go)? The overdetermination is tired: its not just the cliché that probably tipped off police, nor is it the idea that one not could successfully perform cunnilingus and bring another to orgasm while being raped. It's the transgression made possible by the law in the first place—Mary Douglas on purity and pollution—that makes Wilbank's story so stupid: of course its an exoticized man; of course it’s a dumpy white woman; of course she's getting it coming and going; of course the music she heard on the radio was "Spanish," and so on (the only things missing are midgets and farm animals).

What makes the rape fantasy inevitable is this "gap" that Zizek talks about, which Wilbanks stages and attempts to rupture with the act of sacred violation: one is supposed to get married by thirty to a strong, god-fearing, stand-up kind of man, have a home and two SUVs, make babies, and aspire to live in a suburban neighborhood that has underground utility wires, sod, and built-in sprinkler systems with a number of nicely groomed pine-needle islands. The media originally picked up the story because of Wilbanks' violation of this, the sanctity of marriage vows and what it represents. I don't need to rehearse the deeper violence marriage has masked for centuries here, nor is the real "rape" here being discussed (just vet the statements of the fiance, his father, and the preacher and its clearly a case of Jennifer's Extreme Makeover, hosted by Jesus with a buzz cut [who just took up a sponsorship with Sears]). I don't want to make Wilbanks into a feminist champion—for that she's certainly a "lost cause" given the way she's consumed by the familial patriarchs—but I do want to suggest that what we have here is homology, or perhaps even better, the formal inversion of a perverse desire to "be the Law," as Zizek would put it. In other words, what Wilbanks did is perverse in the sense that that we cannot locate motive in transgression—that which many of us get off on—but rather its failure. Our runaway bride is not running away at all: she's trying to be the bride in the most extreme possible, in a way abjectly subservient to the Law, or better, in a way that attempts to model the law-as-function, to close or altogether avoid the gap via self-abstraction (alternately, aphanasis). This is all the more reason why the media have returned to the bride's story once again. The lurid, "explicit" details of the rape fantasy are a ruse. The extremity of the term "rape" points up transgression/violation, but this is running cover for something different altogether. Although rape is a signifier for a horrifyingly real crime, its evocation is not enough to even convince the Law of its truth (the FBI smelled something fishy from the start, they say). The cultural work of rape in this "news story" is doing the work of perversion. Wilbanks is the Bride from Hell.