Every Inch a Woman: Phallic Possession, Femininity, and the Text

Robin Chamberlain is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

Every Inch a Woman is a scholarly examination of textual representations
of the phallic woman from the late 19th century to the present.

Chapter 1 critiques Freud’s identification as desire itself as
masculine, which he inherited from the late-19th-century sexologists.
Chapter 2 examines the genre of the case study and how it represents the
masculinized woman. Chapter 3 looks at first-person narratives by
Jeanette Winterson and Monique Wittig. In Chapter 4, Brooks explores the
figure of the masculinized woman “as a textual figure who either
appropriates masculine and thus phallic privilege or whose masculinized
display, according to different critics, only highlights and
monumentalizes her always lost maleness or male body.”

Chapter 5 considers two fictional texts that explore the addition of
the virtual penis to the female body. In Chapter 6, Brooks examines the
meaning of the dildo in recent lesbian criticism, the famous lesbian
memoir Stone Butch Blues, and a pornographic text titled Lucy & Mickey.
Chapter 7 explores the fiction of Kathy Acker and Sandy Huss, which
focuses on specifically female and non-phallic power. This exploration
leads to the author’s conclusion that power, desire, and identity need
not be predicated on phallic possession.

While Brooks builds on recent theoretical explorations of female
masculinities, including texts by Judith Halberstam, Jay Prosser, and
Jean Bobby Noble, her project differs from theirs in that its primary
emphasis is on femininity and femaleness, rather than on masculinity.
That is to say, she emphasizes the femaleness and/or femininity of the
phallic woman, rather than simply her relationship to masculinity. The
figure Brooks explores is not a woman imitating or becoming a man, but
rather a woman in possession of the/a phallus. Thus, Brooks not only
challenges the meaning and reality of the phallus, but also breaks down
traditional categories of sex and gender.