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MY 15 MINUTES of fame can be measured by Googling "phallus" and "phallologocentrism" together. As of Jan. 10, all 30 entries on the first three pages of results mention a course I am about to teach at Occidental College. The course is titled "The Phallus" and includes an exploration of what philosophers mean by the word "phallologocentrism."
My course's notoriety owes much to the Young America's Foundation, which named "The Phallus" No. 1 on its annual "Dirty Dozen" list of "America's most bizarre and politically correct college courses," and to Charlotte Allen, who in these pages last week used my course as a cudgel to beat up my college for "offering trendy theories of gender, skin color and white-male oppression at the expense of actual academic content."
I knew when I designed my course that its title and short description would be provocative — and I also knew that it was an important course because the phallus is a key concept in psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis has had a tremendous effect on how we think about gender and sexuality. Whether scholars agree or disagree with Sigmund Freud, they have to understand him. Briefly stated, the phallus is not a feature of male anatomy.
According to Freud, girls as well as boys pass through a phallic stage, at which point their gender identity is established. For French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the phallus is a symbol of power and privilege that is associated with patriarchal authority but which no individual man, or woman, ever fully embodies. Not only can a cigar be a phallic symbol — so can wealth, a father's voice, a ballerina and a trophy wife. According to Lacan, the phallus is something men try to have and women try to be.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-tobin14jan14,1,4728109.story?coll=la-news-comment
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