The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 17 (2006)

Intact or Cut?
Castration and the Phallus
in the New Gender Politics

Joshua Paul DALE*

This moment of the cut is haunted by the form of a bloody scrap—the poundof ﬂesh that life pays in order to turn it into the signiﬁer of the signiﬁers, which
it is impossible to restore, as such, to the imaginary body; it is the lost phallusof the embalmed Osiris.1—Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection

THE NEW GENDER POLITICS
In 1999, Edward Bodkin was arrested in the state of Indiana for castrating men in his living room. As the videotapes he made of the procedures show, Bodkin was far from a trained physician. Nevertheless, allof the men he castrated came to him willingly, many leaving their excised
testicles behind at Bodkin’s request, where they ﬂoated in jars on his
kitchen table.2 According to anecdotal evidence collected by Body Modiﬁcation Ezine, Bodkin was not kind to these men. Never highly skilled,
he presided over several botched surgeries that ended with sudden trips
to the hospital; furthermore, a number of men claim that he sold mailorder videos of their castrations without their consent.3

Copyright © 2006 Joshua Paul Dale. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Lecturer, Tokyo Liberal Arts University

223

224

JOSHUA PAUL DALE

In 2002, Shuo-Shan Wang was arrested in Michigan, also for being a“cutter”; that is, for performing castrations without a medical license.4
In contrast to Bodkin, however, Wang had a stellar reputation. He had
castrated over ﬁfty men without a hitch (charging only for supplies) andwas ﬂown around the US and even to other countries by men who valued his services.5 When Wang couldn’t control the bleeding during his
ﬁnal castration, the patient was reluctant to give his name to the authorities, and only did so because Wang was so distraught he feared the cutter might be suicidal.6
Like much of the material I analyze in this article, the story of thesetwo cases was pieced together from a variety of sources: some more reliable, in the sense of being veriﬁable or objective, than others. Instead of
pursuing the quantiﬁable truth of, for example, messages posted to theinternet, I use them to explore certain issues at stake in identity formation. For instance, though a mere three years separates the cases of
Bodkin and Wang, much changed during that time. Instead of answering Bodkin’s classiﬁed ads in hard-to-ﬁnd underground newsletters suchas “Ball Club Quarterly” (circulation: 1,000), Wang’s patients madeonline queries about his success rate in internet chat rooms. Thanks to
the internet, not only could cutters ﬁnd clients, and vice versa, but men
interested in castration found each other. And so a community was born:a community of eunuchs.7 These are non-transsexual men who, throughelective surgery by underground cutters or—rarely—legitimate doctors,
remove their testicles to become self-declared eunuchs. Though thesemen renounce masculinity (in the form of testes or testosterone), they
still retain a male identity.
In her recent book Undoing Gender, Judith Butler argues for remaking the concept of the human being: not merely to celebrate difference,but also to make life livable for those whose bodies or desires resist models of assimilation into prevailing social norms. “I may feel that withoutsome recognizability I cannot live,” she writes, “But I may also feel thatthe terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable.”8 Transsexualor transgendered people who resist pathologization, and intersexed people who resist involuntary and invasive surgery that often impairs theirbodies’ function in the name of a more “normal” appearance, are two
examples of a constellation of movements that Butler terms “the newgender politics,” which demands that the world be reorganized to makeroom for people to live as they are and as they want to be.

INTACT OR CUT?

225

The new gender politics seeks power in the private sphere when it
demands from the medical establishment the right to self-determinationin its most literal sense: that is, access to surgeries to effect permanentalterations to the body. It seeks power in the social sphere by demanding new categories of identity based on deeply held desires that are often
not seen as “normal,” nor recognized as legitimate. Butler identiﬁes anethical obligation to recognize, on their own terms, new communities
organized around an emergent gender or sexual identity; an obligationthat subsequently demands the reexamination of the set of social norms
that refuses to acknowledge, or outright forbids, such identities. While I
am in full support of such efforts by, and on behalf of, transsexuals andthe intersexed, we must also realize that their successes will inevitably
result in more and more types of people emerging to claim the same rights
for their bodies, their desires, their lives.
This gives rise to another question: are we ethically compelled to grant
all such groups recognition of their identity on their own terms? Clearly,
the answer is no: we need not grant legitimacy to, for example, identities formed around racist or violent ideologies, or groups (such as somereligious cults) that are overly coercive or immoderately self-destructive.9 Herein lies a conundrum: how should we deﬁne the limits of our
ethical obligation to recognize difference? Butler never addresses thiscontentious issue, but I believe it will increasingly take center stage as a
crucial issue in the new gender politics.
This article examines a selection of limit cases on the outer boundaries of the new gender politics; in other words, groups whose demand
for recognition poses an ethical challenge for the rest of us. After a brief
section outlining the importance of the Lacanian concepts of the phallus
and jouissance to my project, I move on to the ﬁrst limit case: men against
circumcision. Next, I embark upon an extended analysis of the contemporary eunuch identity; not only to ascertain whether or not there is any
legitimate (that is, non-pathological) reason that might justify these
men’s desire to be castrated and live as eunuchs, but also to outline a litmus test for the acknowledgement and recognition of radical difference.
In order to do so, I examine the ways that self-declared eunuchs state,build and enact their identity. This requires analysis of the discourse generated by the eunuch community—for example, of the popular discussion thread on the Eunuch Archive website entitled: “Is castration a fetish
or a necessity?”—as well as an application of psychoanalytic theory to226

JOSHUA PAUL DALE

the individual choice that faces the would-be eunuch: a choice that I
believe hinges on a crucial distinction between the drive to undergo castration and the desire to live as a eunuch.10 The article concludes by
returning to men like Bodkin and Wang in order to ascertain the challenge that underground cutters pose to the establishment of the eunuch
community and its demand to be recognized.
Judith Halberstam’s well-known work Female Masculinity describes
women who reject femininity and embrace masculinity, yet still retain afemale identity.11 Eunuchs, on the other hand, are men who reject masculinity and do not embrace femininity, yet still retain a male identity.
This leads us to ask: what precisely is the essence of gender identity once
all of its discernable attributes are stripped away? What remains is a negative quality: an empty, albeit haunted, space. Psychoanalysis deﬁnes
sex difference—the discrete subject positions of “male” and “female”—
as different orbits taken around this negative quality, which Lacan terms“the phallus.” However, this term has caused much consternation in theﬁeld of gender studies. While Lacan insists upon distinguishing between
the penis (the physical organ) and the phallus (a symbolic structure, as I
explain below), others strongly reject this separation. According to
Judith Butler:
I understand that progressive Lacanians are quick to distinguish between thephallus and the penis and claim that the ‘paternal’ is a metaphor only. Whatthey do not explain is the way the very distinction that is said to make ‘phallus’ and ‘paternal’ safe for use continues to rely upon and reinstitute the correspondences, penis/phallus and paternal/maternal that the distinctions are
said to overcome.12

I’ll explain why this distinction between penis and phallus—as well as
the correspondence paternal/maternal—is crucial to my analysis. As achild develops from early infancy, it inevitably becomes aware that its
mother desires something that it cannot provide: in other words, every
child realizes that its mother has a life outside the child’s ken. This mysterious, unknown Thing that the mother desires Lacan terms the phallus.
The classic, Freudian Oedipal construction locates the phallus in the person of the father, in the form of the penis. This correspondence has been
justiﬁably dismissed by feminist scholars.
Yet the same tale retold makes possible a much wider application. All
human infants require caregivers: therefore, “mother” should be understood more as a primary caregiver who could be female or male, and who

INTACT OR CUT?

227

may or may not be genetically linked to the child. All caregivers, as
human beings themselves, have a life outside the child: rather than ahousewife’s devotion to her husband, it could just as easily be a single
mother’s need/desire to earn a living that takes her attention away fromthe child. The father need not literally exist at all; and it is in this sensethat the paternal becomes a metaphor, as Butler observes. My point isthat the caregiver’s desire inevitably ﬂows not only towards the child,
but also away, and at some point the child realizes this and perceives thislatter ﬂow as a gulf in the caregiver that the child is unable to ﬁll.
Hitherto, the child has always tried to ﬁll lack in the caregiver—in otherwords, to be the phallus for the caregiver. Realizing the impossibility ofthis dream, the child gives up attempting to be the phallus, and instead
realizes that it will always lack this mysterious object.
This is the Lacanian castration complex, and how the child deals withthis realization becomes the determining factor in its assuming a subject
position as male or female. Sex difference accrues from two different
ways of “having” the phallus. On the male side is the taking on of thephallus as lack; on the female side, the awareness of not having the phallus is lack redoubled: thus women are characterized by the lack of lack.
But all human subjects are constituted around this central dilemma thatforces them to deal with their inability to be everything the mother (caregiver) desires. In this way, we can say that in Lacanian terms, the castration complex is pre-Oedipal, and therefore that everyone—men andwomen—is always already castrated. All human subjects are incomplete:
wholeness is but a prelapsarian dream of perfect unity with the motherin the womb. We are all cut; no one is intact.
The phallus is a signiﬁer of something to which the child does not haveaccess, but which (the child presumes) satisﬁes the mother. Lacan’s term
for this mysterious satisfaction is jouissance. Because the phallus is lack,an entirely negative structure, it cuts us off from jouissance at the sametime it points us towards it. As we can see from the example of the childand the caregiver, jouissance is always located outside the subject.
Therefore, though we are always driven towards this mystical substancethat would ﬁll our lack and make us whole, it is impossible to attain. In
fact, since taking on lack (the phallus) is a precondition of subjectivity,
unmediated access to jouissance would undo subjectivity: make it
impossible to sustain.
Consider Lacan’s famous triad of imaginary, symbolic, and Real.

228

JOSHUA PAUL DALE

Jouissance ﬁlls the inaccessible Real, while the symbolic order is hometo the maternal and paternal forces, in addition to radical difference, or
the Other. The imaginary is the realm of the Cartesian cogito: the ego,or what we think of as reality. This three point structure is crucial to the
ethical dimension of the new gender politics, because both the symbolicand imaginary offer different forms of protection against the lethal powerof jouissance in the Real. First, I will address the issue of fantasy. Though
we think of ourselves as wanting jouissance, wanting to be whole, wereally act to prevent ourselves from accessing it. The primary means of
doing so is through fantasy in the imaginary realm. Fantasy protects us
from jouissance.
Male subjectivity is formed around the central contradiction that having the phallus means being aware that the phallus lacks, and any attempt
to make the penis ﬁll that lack (that is, to attempt to access jouissancewith or through the penis) is naught but fantasy. Therefore, far fromdenying the existence of any (fantasy) correspondence between phallus
and penis, “progressive Lacanians,” to use Butler’s term, invoke thephallus speciﬁcally to break down this imagined relationship and reveal
the frightening power of jouissance to shape human desire. To invert
another of her formulations, I would say that the phallus is never “safefor use,” and to illustrate this concept, my analysis of men who desire
castration will show that jouissance continually threatens to breakthrough any fantasy scenario designed to protect the subject from it.
Finally, lest we get too wrapped up in this debate over phallus vs. penis,
I want to make clear that my goal is to show that the true importance ofthe former in the new gender politics lies in the particular way that it signiﬁes jouissance to the subject. As we will see, our ethical obligation toother people hinges on the way that they organize their relationship tojouissance.
“A RELATIVELY UNRESPONSIVE STICK”
Freudian castration anxiety—which, in its most basic sense, is the realization that to have a penis is to accept that one might someday suffer its
loss—entirely misses universal castration as a constitutive element of
human subjectivity. Furthermore, this Lacanian formulation continues
to be a bone of contention in gender studies, where a lamentable—andatavistically Freudian—tendency remains to conﬂate the penis with thephallus. I insist on the proper use of this term because misreading theINTACT OR CUT?

229

phallus as belonging to the penis enables the belief that male genitals
have something to say about male subjectivity. They do not.
Genitalia are extraneous to sex difference because “male” and “female” describe not physical bodies, but different ways of organizing thepsyche around the phallus, an unsymbolizable object. Female to maletranssexuals, by their very existence, bear witness to the fact that thepenis does not make the man, as do the many thousands of men who haveundergone chemical or surgical castration as a treatment for cancer.13
Yet the fetishistic association of male genitals to male subjectivity continues to circulate, and the wish for the penis to be the key to understanding male identity generates endless fantasies. In this section, I
examine two of these fantasies to see where they go wrong, which will
help me to set the ground for my argument that the phallus as signiﬁer
of jouissance is crucial to the issue of ethical obligation within the newgender politics.
In the United States, a small but vocal number of men have convinced
themselves that their circumcision as infants, still a routine practice inAmerican hospitals, scarred them for life. These men have organized inorder to share their pain and publicly call for an end to what they see asa barbaric practice that traumatizes infants and robs men of their masculinity. On websites such as the Circumcision Resource Center (CRC),
anti-circumcision activists present their lack of a foreskin as the central
organizing principle of their existence. Since statistical evidence supporting their position is scanty, the CRC relies largely on testimonial narratives in order to buttress their position that circumcision results inpermanent trauma. “The single most traumatic event of my life with thegreatest psychological damage was my circumcision as an infant,” writes
one anonymous poster to the CRC website. He continues by relating two
childhood experiences of viewing other boys’ penises, concluding: “I
had no idea at the time of how traumatic it was. I only knew that there
was something different, and I was thinking about it every day.”14
The trauma proclaimed at the onset of this passage is never fully
explained by the subsequent narrative. This man doesn’t remember his
actual circumcision, which took place in infancy, and he speciﬁcallystates that the memories he does have of realizing he was different fromother boys were not traumatic. What he does remember is how heobsessed upon this difference: how it stuck in his mind and how often
he thought about it. He never mentions it troubling him when he was achild, which is not surprising: in the United States, there are plenty of230

JOSHUA PAUL DALE

both sorts of boys around. But for this particular man, the difference
between not having a foreskin and having one attains a singular importance when suddenly, as an adult, he realizes retroactively that he has
been cut from the herd, and it is only at this point that his circumcisionappears as a horrible trauma. The obsession now ﬁnds a purpose: it bears
witness to the mark left by the desire of an uncaring Other who demanded a piece of his body, never to be returned, as an obscure sacriﬁce. For
this man and the others like him, circumcision is castration.
When I write Other with a capital “O,” it does not represent other people, it represents the big Other of the symbolic order. In my reading, anticircumcision activists apprehend this distinction to the extent that they
reserve a special horror for the fact that circumcisions take place becauseof traditions—religious or secular, it matters not which—that do not necessarily involve the wishes of any particular person. Evil doctors or rabbis do not circumcise infants for their own pleasure, or because they
accede to the dark desires of unﬁt parents. They are only instruments ofa regime that demands this sacriﬁce without—according to men against
circumcision—satisfactorily explaining why.
In psychoanalytic terms, however, the explanation is clear. As I said
earlier, castration is universal. The men of the CRC are attempting to
map the cut of circumcision onto the trauma that occasions the assumption of subjectivity (which I explained previously as the child becoming
aware it lacks that which would bring full satisfaction to its caregiver).
In refusing to have the phallus—that is, to admit that every human being,
and thus every penis, is incomplete in a way that has nothing to do withcircumcision—they take refuge in a fantasy of being the phallus, andtherefore are able to imagine a state in which not just their penis but theirwhole being is uncut and complete, lacking nothing. But why should thisfantasy of wholeness hold such allure; furthermore, what are they avoiding by clinging to it so strongly?
Beyond the imagined psychic trauma of the knife, the men of the CRC
extend their claim that circumcision has made them incomplete into theworld of the sensate when they maintain that the loss of the foreskin’s
nerve endings has barred them from the degree of sexual pleasure towhich an intact penis would entitle them. When spread out, the anti-circumcision men announce bitterly, the foreskin of an adult male “is about
12 square inches of highly erogenous tissue.”15 Since it is impossible tomeasure and compare the subjective intensity of each individual’s sexual pleasure, the CRC attempts to prove its claim that circumcision

INTACT OR CUT?

231

decreases sensitivity by citing a survey that reports: “Circumcised men
were more likely to engage in masturbation, heterosexual oral sex andanal sex than intact men.” They conclude: “the result suggests that circumcised men seek alternative forms of stimulation to compensate for
reduced sensitivity.”16 Here the anti-circumcision men expose a very
interesting aspect of the fantasy that informs their fetishization of theforeskin. It seems that cutting away these generous twelve square inches of sensitive ﬂesh unleashes desire, dooming the circumcised man toa panoply of perversion because his attainment of sexual pleasure now
requires unnatural exertions. Uncircumcised men, by default, are presumed to be entirely happy to conﬁne sexual pleasure to “normal”—that
is, penetrative, heterosexual and reproductive—sex. Their claim, therefore, is that the foreskin performs a regulatory function, channeling sexual desire into socially approved areas, and thus has a crucial role inproducing male subjects who function within heteronormative codes.
By projecting the psychic cut that produces the subject-who-lacks onto
the physical body, the anti-circumcision activists make a fetish of theuncircumcised man. Possession of a foreskin appears as the brass ringon the merry-go-round, a ticket into a paradise forever lost to them. It’s
easy to see that the prelapsarian state of wholeness to which anti-circumcision men aspire is impossible to attain: after all, most people haveno trouble realizing that the foreskin is not a magic ticket to a (sex) lifeof fulﬁllment and happiness. The anti-circumcision men are able to sidestep this obvious point because their gaze is ﬁxed obsessively on the
moment of the cut, and—crucially—on the retrospectively produced
emotions through which they attempt to make the resultant lack meaningful. The other anonymous quotations cited on the CRC website attest
to this: “I feel violated and abused”; “I have felt a deep rage for a longtime about this”; “Circumcision has given my life a much diminishedand shameful ﬂavor”; “My penis feels incomplete, deformed,
maimed.”17 As I said previously, the lack that is a precondition of subjectivity is signiﬁed by the phallus. The phallus is a power that can neverbe represented by the penis, because it signiﬁes the very desire of the
Other that intervened, incomprehensibly, to forbid the subject thatwholeness that it never really had as such, but can only retroactively
infer. Regretting, railing against, and bemoaning the missing part of their
penis allows the anti-circumcision men to ignore the fact that the assumption of lack is inevitable: part and parcel of the human condition.
“Unprotected . . . it has become callused,” says one man circumcised

232

JOSHUA PAUL DALE

as an adult. “I seem to have a relatively unresponsive stick where once
I had a sexual organ.”18 Again, circumcision appears as castration.
Without the safe haven of the foreskin, the penis is insensate, inanimate,ruined, and the men of the CRC long for the lost protection offered bythat ﬂeshy sleeve: a safe distance from raw desire, from perversion in its
polymorphous forms. In reality, however, it is their fantasy of the virile
intact man who they can never be that actually guarantees their protection. We circumcised men are not whole, says this fantasy, but a groupof whole men with intact penises does exist, and they have access to theenjoyment (the jouissance) that we lack. Yet this is precisely the fundamental error that anti-circumcision men make. Other people do not enjoy
the jouissance that we lack, because as I said earlier, unmediated accessto jouissance is expressly forbidden to the subject-who-lacks (that is, toeverybody). Moreover, their fetishization of this jouissance, in whichintact men are presumed to enjoy a penis of such exaggerated sensitivity
that it enables orgasms off the scale, also makes a completely interior
world, in which sex entails seamless transferal from the moist protectionof the foreskin into—invariably—the moist protection of the vagina.
Again, the fantasy of returning to the womb appears, in which being thephallus ﬁlls lack in the mother and provides access to jouissance without limits: an impossible wholeness without lack. Calluses, in contrast,
are a signiﬁer not only of wear and of work, but of relation: of skin incontact with the world.
To be a man is to lack: this is the realization that anti-circumcision
men cannot face. Instead, they make a fetish object of the foreskin inorder to manifest their rage over a lost paradise of wholeness that neverwas. These men look at their circumcised penises and see somethinglacking, and bemoan the fact that they were never given a choice. By ﬁxating on this missing part, they don’t have to admit that no penis is intact:that the phallus lies not between the legs of the boy under the next showerin the locker room, but always already elsewhere.
My next example involves the cut not of circumcision, but of castration. In an article called “Third Sex” for OUT magazine, Dr. Richard
Wassersug, castrated as a treatment for his prostate cancer, declares himself to be a eunuch and describes his new identity as an ideal blend ofmale and female: “Now, with a brain free from the tyranny of testosterone, I can, for the ﬁrst time in my life, begin to see the world more theway women see it.” He also announces a newfound bisexuality, which
he again attributes to his new ability to “see beyond the corporal exteri-INTACT OR CUT?

233

or, far further, far deeper than before.” This declaration that castration
has propelled him into a third sex with a unique perspective helps Dr.
Wassersug avoid seeing himself the way testosterone-deprived prostatecancer patients tend to: namely, as a “damaged male.” He concludes: “Ifmen are from Mars and women are from Venus, then eunuchs can tour
the whole solar system.”19 While I would never deny Dr. Wassersug theability to rebuild his self-esteem by embracing a eunuch identity, I want
to stress that the wish to become a “third sex” should not be considereda viable justiﬁcation for voluntary castration. First, while the eliminationof testosterone surely gives one a new perspective on the male condition, it does not confer special knowledge of being a woman. Furthermore, Dr. Wassersug’s narrative describes a being detached from gender
altogether, with a mobility that can be naught but imaginary.
This is not rare in the world of eunuchs. Some men who desire castration speak wistfully of “the eunuch calm”: a monk-like detachment
supposedly brought about by the elimination of testosterone from thebody. According to Jeff, the eunuch assistant to Dr. Spector, who runs
the only medical clinic in the United States that provides castration on
demand: “You will develop the ‘eunuch calm,’ an indescribable feelingof peace and calm.”20 However, there is no mention of such a phenomenon in the medical literature. Furthermore, the eunuch calm is not arelease from a sexed identity—as I said before, eunuchs still consider
themselves to be men—but rather from the pressures of the libido, fromsex itself. This presents a problem. A man who wishes to be released,
not just from the libidinous pressure, hormonal or otherwise, of male
identity, but from desire itself, is doomed to disappointment. Castration
does not deliver the instant nirvana of Buddha or a monk-like detachment from the world.
If this were the case, then eunuchs would be closer to angels thanhumans: sexless beings ﬂoating outside the mundane world of desirewith a privileged relationship to jouissance. But to imagine oneself as
removed from desire all together, looking down on the antics of hormone-driven sexed beings from Olympian heights, is an impossible subject position. The “eunuch calm,” in other words, is another fantasy of
being the phallus, in that considering oneself “a third sex” involves imagining oneself as embodying the primary signiﬁer around which each sex
must position itself.
It is ironic that the opposition “intact or cut” can refer to both circumcision and castration: for, while the anti-circumcision men’s fantasy

234

JOSHUA PAUL DALE

of being the phallus is dependent upon an intact penis (that is, one witha foreskin), the men who indulge in the same fantasy by aspiring to theeunuch calm require a cut penis (one without testicles). In both cases,
these very different groups of men deploy fantasy to avoid the realization that male subjectivity is dependent not upon having a complete, orincomplete, penis, but rather upon having the phallus: in other words,
acknowledging lack as an unavoidable aspect of the human condition.
“A MALE WITH UNCONTROLLABLE LIBIDO”
The fantasy that underlies patriarchy denies universal castration byattempting to construct women as lacking (that is, castrated) and men as
whole, with the penis being the primary signiﬁer that sutures this imaginary relation together. At the most basic level, a would-be eunuch is a
man who is unable to participate in this fantasy. Looking at his penis—
or, more precisely, his testicles—this man sees something attached to his
body, yet not of his body, that presses upon him with unbearable intensity, threatening to overwhelm him at every turn. In other words, his
testicles—those two scraps of ﬂesh that (stereotypically) make him a
man—appear to him as pure jouissance. Therefore, looking at his penis,
the would-be eunuch sees an unbearable excess: he is struck by theknowledge that he is not castrated, and this ongoing disaster ﬁlls him
with anxiety.
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud initially links anxiety tocastration in its most general sense, as the anticipation of the loss of an
object dear to the subject. But when he attempts to locate the root causeof anxiety, he runs into a problem. The ﬁrst traumatic experience of anxiety that a subject undergoes is birth, or separation from the mother. Yetat this moment, the newly-born infant has no awareness of itself as a subject, and thus no way to experience the loss of an object. For this reason,anxiety cannot be deﬁnitively linked to any particular originatory experience or anticipation of loss. Though it signals danger, anxiety itself has
no locatable cause.21 Therefore, having a penis, or not having one, or
having one and fearing its loss, does not cause anxiety.
As Joan Copjec points out, since anxiety is without cause, its appearance cannot be doubted. This in turn connects anxiety to certainty: inother words, what anxiety signals is Real.22 As I said earlier, the LacanianReal is home to jouissance, unmediated access to which would prove

INTACT OR CUT?

235

unendurable to the subject. The phallus is the signiﬁer of jouissance: nota jouissance that belongs to us, but the jouissance of the Other, accessto which is both forbidden and impossible. Would-be eunuchs often havefantasies in which sacriﬁcing their testicles gives them a new relationship to this jouissance—the eunuch calm is one example—but the point
I’m trying to make here is that, beyond any imagined beneﬁts, whatdeﬁnes men who desire castration is the strength of their certainty that
castration is for them, even if they cannot (as is often the case) imagine
why this should be so. According to one man, whose fervor is echoed bymany others: “All I know for sure is about ten years ago, I knew . . .
KNEW that I had to become a eunuch!”23 It is for this reason, and withthis certainty, that men who desire castration dream constantly of ridding themselves of the unwanted presence of their testicles, and thereby
escaping from the crushing burden posed by their own libido.
Before his castration, a eunuch who calls himself Talula says, “I hada real problem with sexual urges and would often masturbate three orfour times a day. It was very inconvenient and even affected my job performance. Now I feel much more in control.”24 I’m certainly not going
to argue how much masturbation or sex is too much; rather, my point isthat the issue of control is very often stressed in the eunuch community.
According to prospective eunuch Nolo, sex “is consuming my every
thought and messing with my progress as a human [. . .] I still want tohave sex but I don’t want my balls in control anymore. I want to control
my own life.”25 The stereotype of the insatiable male libido—in otherwords, the fantasy that men are constantly driven towards attaining thesatisfaction of jouissance—is a constitutive element in the patriarchal
construction of masculinity. In contrast, I maintain that in their rebellion
against this idea, men who desire castration reﬂect a fundamental truthof human existence: that we are drawn not towards jouissance, but awayfrom it; and furthermore, that it is precisely this ﬂight from the Real thatcreates us as desiring subjects.
Testosterone ﬁgures to would-be eunuchs as it does to the culture atlarge: as the engine behind male desire. Men who want to be castrated
feel that testosterone rages out of control in their bodies, forcing theminto an unhealthy ﬁxation on sex that is so unlike their internal image ofthemselves that it appears to come from without, making their testicles
seem like alien growths pumping poison into their system:

236

JOSHUA PAUL DALE

I want to be castrated because my balls represent all of the maleness in me
that I’m uncomfortable with [. . .] The symbolic aspect of removing my balls
is important to me for what it represents to my psyche, and the chemical consequences in terms of both mindset and appearance are desirable to me . . .
[plus], they look damn silly just hanging there like that.26

To men like Frankie, the loss of their testicles comes as more than justa relief: the cut of the knife literally propels them into the symbolic realm.
Freed of their manhood, eunuchs are ﬁnally able to construct their identity as “whole” the way the rest of us do: by taking the distance fromjouissance that makes desire possible. Thus one newly-made eunuch
called Riverwind is able to say, after his castration at Dr. Spector’s medical clinic in Philadelphia, “I remember walking down the hall after
surgery to meet my friends and thinking, ‘I am ﬁnally complete.’ ”27
At present, the aforementioned clinic is the only one in the UnitedStates that is willing to perform bilateral orchiectomy (removal of bothtesticles) on healthy patients, and it will do so without psychiatric evaluation. On his website registration form, Dr. Felix Spector includes justone category for non-transsexual men to describe their desire for castration: namely, “a male with uncontrollable libido.” All a man needs to do
is check this box, schedule an appointment, arrive with a check for two
thousand dollars, and sign a release form. Outpatient surgical castration
will be completed the same day.
Although there is a complex of reasons for desiring castration postedon the websites I analyze, an insatiable libido is the most common reason cited. An uncontrollable sex drive is structurally connected to the
key element that the medical establishment looks for before it willapprove sex reassignment surgery: namely, the feeling of having beenborn into the wrong body. In both cases, the subject feels a radical separation between a deeply felt self-image and the physical body. However,there is a crucial difference between the post-surgery fate of transsexuals and that of eunuchs: while the former begin new lives as men or
women, there is no such pre-prepared, socially sanctioned category foreunuchs. Castration appears to these men as an imperative: they feel thatthey cannot exist as “intact” men, so they remove their testicles in orderto renegotiate their symbolic identity. Then they face a dilemma: what
identity awaits them once the knife has made its cut?
I consider this issue of building the eunuch identity in tandem withanother paradox, one that lies buried in the odd formulation: “an uncontrollable libido.” While we might think that would-be eunuchs are sex
addicts who close out the singles bars every night of the week, it’s more

INTACT OR CUT?

237

accurate to say that their unbearable libido causes them to focus obsessively on the one thing that promises relief: the act of castration. Yet,castration can only occur once. What happens to a man when the realization of his deepest fantasy, around which his entire psychic life has
been organized, would seem to foreclose the possibility of ever indulging
in that fantasy again? Answering this question will require a close analysis not only of the community that eunuchs have formed, but also of thenature and place that fantasy holds for men who desire castration. It will
set up my ﬁnal consideration of the legitimacy of the eunuch identity,
which I will articulate through a reading of jouissance and the desiring
eunuch.
A PLACE FOR EUNUCHS
The online eunuch community had its start in the unmoderated Usenet
jungle, with groups like <alt.eunuchs.questions>. However, in the mid
1990s some men interested in castration found their way to Body Modiﬁcation Ezine (BME). They founded a section of BME called “malenulliﬁcation,” which currently features over sixteen hundred graphic pictures of castration surgery and over one hundred eighty descriptions of
this procedure.28 In 1997, a spin-off website to BME called the Eunuch
Archive (EA) was founded. Today, it boasts 6,394 ﬁctional stories and amoderated BBS to which over forty-ﬁve thousand messages have beenposted.29
From its beginning, the Eunuch Archive was intended to serve as aresource and community for anyone interested in castration. This
includes those who only want to fantasize about losing their testicles, aswell as pre- and post-castration eunuchs. It also includes male to femaletranssexuals who undergo bilateral orchietomy as a prelude to sex reassignment surgery.30 The site is similarly diverse in terms of sexuality.
Gay, straight, married, single, vanilla, S/M, celibate: the EA is for everyone. A sense of humor and irony is encouraged (epitomized by the animated icons of snapping scissors), and regular members make efforts tokeep track of each other over time. The overall goals and methods of theEunuch Archive are strongly allied to those of the new gender politics.
Like transsexuals, the transgendered and the intersexed, the EA calls fortolerance and diversity within the framework of building something that
does not exist in contemporary Western society: in this case, the eunuch
identity.
Online organizing is crucial to all of these movements, but it has even

238

JOSHUA PAUL DALE

more importance for eunuchs. The online community that awaits, postcastration, to offer congratulations and afﬁrmation of their new statusprovides the only way for these men to attain the “recognizability” that
Judith Butler identiﬁes as so important to making life livable. It’s easy
to see why, for while a man might become a eunuch in a basement, hotel
room or medical clinic, the internet is still the only place where one cango to be a eunuch. Next, I examine the ways in which the eunuch identity is established, maintained, and regulated in cyberspace, starting witha basic split epitomized by the Eunuch Archive’s two parts: the story
boards and the discussion boards.
The six thousand stories posted to the Eunuch Archive portray justabout every imaginable scenario of castration: from accidental to intentional, from malevolent spinster aunts wielding sewing scissors to ritualistic S/M encounters with “hot leather daddies.” The story boards also
include historical pieces about Italian castrati, Ottoman harems, Russian
Skopti, and Chinese court eunuchs, as well as ﬁction about contemporary Indian hijra. These latter stories dream of a home for the eunuch
identity: a place where it can be expressed positively and is accepted bysociety at large. They comprise an act of cross-cultural appropriation
based on a nostalgic fantasy of a symbolic order, located ever elsewhere,that has marked out a place for eunuchs within it.31 The discussion
boards, on the other hand, seek to carve out that space in the here andnow.
As the Eunuch Archive grew, its focus shifted from discussions of castration fantasies to the practical reality of becoming, and being, a eunuch.
In the last few years, many discussion board threads have discussed thehealth effects of castration—physical and mental; both beneﬁts anddrawbacks—and warned against the danger of attempts at self-castrationor castration by unqualiﬁed cutters. Participants in these threads always
stress that castration is a permanent, life-changing act: simultaneously,
they afﬁrm that it was the right choice for them. Through this “safe andsane” approach, eunuchs seek to clear the path to acceptance of theiridentity by the medical establishment and society in general.32 Identity
building efforts such as these, however, ignore the central, indeed constitutive, position of fantasy in the Eunuch Archive. All participants on
the EA have a sexual fascination for castration, in which they indulge
with every visit to the archive, whether or not they refer to it directly. Of
his participation on the EA, one man writes: “I have learned that there
are other issues to ‘castration’ in general, quite a lot to be true and some

INTACT OR CUT?

239

of them quite fascinating too, but the simple sexual fascination of it isclearly recognizable, [and] generally widespread.”33
The regulatory efforts of the EA—that is, the efforts its members maketo present a self-aware, health-conscious front to each other and theworld—and the strong, shared fantasies underlying the site clash on theissue of illegal cutters. Discussions about where to ﬁnd a cutter, or debate
on the merits of various cutters, are banned from the boards: the ofﬁcial
position of the EA is that all castrations should be performed legally by
qualiﬁed physicians. However, the fascination for using undergroundcutters remains high in the Eunuch Archive, and it is clear from offhandcomments on the discussion boards that private discussions on such matters using instant messaging occur regularly among members of the EA.
My analysis now turns to this enigmatic ﬁgure, present everywhere but
nowhere, who haunts the online eunuch community: the undergroundcutter.
HAUNTED BY A BLOODY SCRAP
Gelding, a eunuch castrated in 1994, long claimed on his webpage andin many interviews to have been cut without his consent by “a studly
leather couple with an obvious Top and bottom, both hot, hairy-chested
leather-wearing men” in an elaborate S/M scene. Gelding tellingly
admitted that his lurid tale was a distillation of all of his personal castration fantasies:
My fantasies when I thought about being castrated when I was playing withmyself were similar to the actual event. All the essential parts were there:
being tied and helpless to object to or prevent anything, the presence of morethan one male to take part and to watch. Even the cooking and eating [of ]my excised testicles was something I had imagined in my wildest fantasies.34

However, in a 2000 interview by Bob Whitby for the San Francisco
Weekly, Gelding reveals that this oft-told and very theatrical tale was, infact, a complete fabrication.35 Gelding says that he concocted this story
for his own protection after he landed in the hospital due to complications from a castration by an underground cutter. By portraying himself
as a victim, he escaped the psychological evaluation usually forced on
men who are hospitalized after illegal castrations. He refuses to say anything about his actual castration to Whitby.36 Presumably, it doesn’t
make nearly as good a story.

240

JOSHUA PAUL DALE

Gelding’s fantasy was accepted as true for years in the eunuch community; and no wonder, for it is a very common one among men interested in castration. Here we ﬁnd an Oedipal fantasy of the primal Father.
The force that the child imagines would fulﬁll its mother’s desire renders the child itself unnecessary, and thus sweeps aside everything in its
path. We can see this in Gelding’s fantasy: the dominant, hairy leatherman represents pure, unstoppable jouissance. These would-be eunuchs
feel their testicles don’t belong to them, they belong to the Father, sothey sacriﬁce their balls to the Father’s jouissance with relief and pleasure.37 In psychoanalytic terms, we take on lack in order to ﬂee the primal Father and enter into the realm of desire: for, as I said previously,
embracing lack offers protection from the destructive power of jouissance and opens the way to subjectivity. So far, so good: but Gelding’s
story does not end here.
Gelding’s highly visible online presence—he claims to have counseled thousands of men about castration—causes Whitby to describe him
as “a kind of den mother for the genitally obsessed.”38 Thus, even after
becoming a eunuch himself, Gelding’s life continues to revolve aroundcastration; and furthermore, it seems he offers services beyond mere
counseling. Gelding makes a surprising, indeed unprecedented, admission in Whitby’s interview. He declares that he himself has become anunderground cutter who has performed around ﬁfty castrations, many in
S/M contexts.39 Gelding’s earlier admission of deceit casts a certain
amount of doubt upon this assertion, so I will analyze it as I did his initial story: as a constitutive fantasy, this time of the eunuch-turned-cutter.
When Gelding takes up the scalpel and performs castrations, he does
so to invoke the ﬁgure of his own fantasies, the primal Father. Slavoj
Zizek’s term for this ﬁgure, “the obscene and revengeful Father-ofEnjoyment” is particularly evocative, for Gelding admits to being troubled by the amount of sexual excitement he feels while performing
castrations.40 He voices fears that his own enjoyment may have led him
to perform operations on men who were not ready for castration; but,though he professes regret, he also shows no intention of putting an end
to his underground activities.41 Gelding thus reveals another force atwork in the eunuch community: the drive, not just to be castrated, but tocastrate others. While the community ofﬁcially casts out undergroundcutters, it secretly not only tolerates them but embraces them, and I wantto consider the nature of this embrace.

INTACT OR CUT?

241

This article set out to examine how self-declared eunuchs ﬁt into the
new gender politics. However extreme an act voluntary castration may
at ﬁrst appear, through a careful deployment of the concept of the phallus-as-lack, I have argued that a non-pathological desire for castration ispossible. For some men, castration can end a harmful obsession and set
them on a more livable path. But there is more to the eunuch identity
than life without testicles. Because the eunuch identity is not recognized
as legitimate by the medical establishment, the underground cutting
scene is burgeoning. Therefore, though there is an obvious need to differentiate between those with a fetish for the act of castration and those
who really want to live as eunuchs, telling the difference is not so easy,
even for the men themselves.
Twenty years ago (I was 35), I too would have vehemently asserted that myinterest in castration was strictly fantasy and that I would never want it tohappen in real life. But the fetish is something that creeps up on you over theyears. It stalks you like some dark specter from your dreams or your subconscious, growing stronger, asserting its will. If you have the fantasy, then
the thing surely lives in you. All it needs is a fertile environment to manifest
itself and grow.42

Most men trace the origin of their desire for castration to adolescence.
They ﬂee in terror from the onslaught of testosterone, which they are told
will make them into men. Curiously, though, most men don’t consider
actually being castrated until late middle age, like ﬁfty-ﬁve-year-old
Farrell Squire, whom I quoted above. Although these men have lived thewhole of their adult lives in ﬂight from masculinity, they only choose to
become eunuchs when the tide of testosterone ﬁnally begins to recedefrom their bodies. In the desire of these older men we can clearly see thesymbolic import of castration: why their need to be cut goes beyond thebiological. When the need for castration would seem to be at its ebb,
instead of going away it only renews itself with undeniable ferocity.
Though a small group from the Eunuch Archive recently marched ina gay pride parade with a sign marked “Eunuch Unit” in Halifax, Nova
Scotia, eunuchs are still far from being a visible minority.43 Most of theiridentity building efforts still take place on the internet, which provides
the “fertile environment” that Farrell Squire identiﬁes as key to the development of the desire to be castrated. But behind their efforts to create, express and inhabit the eunuch identity—to build a livable life
together after castration—a darker force looms. Castrations by cutters

242

JOSHUA PAUL DALE

are increasingly documented by web logs, photos, and videos, which are
uploaded to BME.44 This proliferation of representations of the irrevocable cut of the knife that turns fantasy to reality testiﬁes to the enduring power that this scene has for men who desire castration. It offers adangerous pleasure: to organize one’s life, not around the eunuch identity, but rather around the act of castration. Eunuchs who become cutters themselves are able to continue to indulge in a fetish for castrationeven after their own has occurred, but only by encouraging more men to
be cut. By doing so, they embrace castration not as protection against
jouissance, but as a fetish for jouissance itself. It is here, on the far edgeof an already marginal community, that we ﬁnd a broader lesson.
Judith Butler’s call for a new gender politics was prompted by communities of people who feel that they cannot live without being recognized to some degree, but who also feel that the way that they arerecognized makes their lives unlivable. Now, in this underground circuitof cutters and clients that traces a self-contained, closed loop around a
fetishized, private jouissance, we ﬁnd the potential for something different: a group that avoids the need for recognition entirely. Free accessto (castrated) cutters by anyone who desires castration entails a groupthat lacks nothing, and therefore has no motivation to interact with anyone else. Here, then, lies the limit of our ethical obligation to recognize
difference, for the fetishization of private jouissance makes the very concept of community impossible to realize.
My analyses of anti-circumcision men and the “eunuch calm” showedthat the demand for recognition of an imaginary subject position (i.e.,
one that revolves around a fantasy of being the phallus) does not incuran ethical obligation. In contrast, the claim to a eunuch identity thatinvolves a symbolic subject position (that of having the phallus), does
incur that obligation, but only under the following conditions: when
eunuchs call to be recognized on their own terms, they must be met not
only with acceptance, tolerance and compassion, but also with legislation and regulation, both juridical and medical.45 It is, in other words, theplea for their lack to be recognized that incurs an ethical obligation, for
it is only by this means that the community of eunuchs may form in a
way that requires it to exist in relation to others.

INTACT OR CUT?

243

NOTES
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, Trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Norton,
1977), 265.
2
Douglas Wissing, “The Great Castrator,” The Daily Yomiuri, October 31, 1999.
3“Edward Bodkin,” The BME Encyclopedia, Ed. Shannon Larratt, 2004,
http://encyc.bmezine.com/?Edward_Bodkin, [Access date: September 10, 2005].
4“Castration Suspect Faces Charges in Court,” ClickOnDetroit.com, 2002,
http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/1629114/detail.html, [Access date: September 14,2005].
5“Kitchen Table Castrator Convicted,” CNN.com, 2003,
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/05/court.castration/, [Access date: September 14,2005].
6<luvpain>, “Chinese Castrator Sentenced in Michigan,” Eunuch Archive online
posting, April 20, 2003, http://www.eunuch.org, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
7
For example, see the Eunuch Archive at http://www.eunuch.org.
8
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4.
9
For example, in 1997, the “Heaven’s Gate” religious cult encouraged its male members to undergo castration before committing suicide in order to be reborn on the alien
spacecraft they believed was following the Hale-Bopp comet.
10<Sag111>, “Is Castration a Fetish or a Necessity?”, online posting, June 11, 2003,
http://www.eunuch.org, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
11
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity, (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998).
12
Butler, Undoing Gender, 136.
13
A fact buttressed by the growing number of FTM transsexuals who choose not toundergo phalloplastry.
14“Discovering Circumcision Feelings,” Circumcision Resource Center, 2004,
http://www.circumcision.org/discover.htm, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
15
ibid.
16
ibid.
17
“Psychological Impact of Circumcision on Men,” Circumcision Resource Center,
2004, http://www.circumcision.org/impact.htm, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
18“Men Circumcised as Adults,” Circumcision Resource Center, 2004,
http://www.circumcision.org/adults.htm, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
19
Richard Wassersug, “Third Sex,” OUT, September 2003, 13–15.
20
Felix Spector, “Jeff’s Pages,” Felix Spector, D.O., 1998,
http://www.felixspector.com/jeffspages.htm, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
21
Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, trans. Angela Richards, (NewYork: W.W. Norton and Company, 1959), 58, 59.
22
Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1995), 118.
23
<Charlieje>, “Tell Me: Why are You into Castration?” online posting, December
14, 2001, http://www.eunuch.org, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
24
Talula, interview, Body Modiﬁcation Ezine, January, 1998,
http://www.bmezine.com/news/people/A10101/talula/, [Access date: September 14,2005].
25<Nolo>, “Tell Me: Why are You into Castration?” online posting, January 8, 2002,
http://www.eunuch.org, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
26<Frankie>, “Tell Me: Why are You into Castration?” online posting, December 21,
2001, http://www.eunuch.org, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
1

244

JOSHUA PAUL DALE

Riverwind, interview with Talula, Body Modiﬁcation Ezine, July 13, 2003,
http://www.bmezine.com/news/talula/20030713.html, [Access date: September 14,2005].
28“Male Nulliﬁcation,” Body Modiﬁcation Ezine, 2005, http://www.bmezine.com,[Access date: September 14, 2005].
29
Eunuch Archive, http://www.eunuch.org, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
Images of castration continue to be uploaded only to BME.
30This is often for ﬁnancial reasons: full gender reassignment surgery is very expensive.
31
Structurally, this fantasy is the same as that indulged in by the anti-circumcision
men when they imagine the full, complete sexual life that an uncut penis would grantthem.
32
See also the “Eunuch and Castration FAQs,” Eunuch Archive,
http://www.eunuch.org, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
33<haltos>, “PR Issue and More,” online posting, March 12, 2003,
http://www.eunuch.org, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
34
Gelding, interview, Body Modiﬁcation Ezine, [undated],
http://www.bmezine.com/news/people/A10101/gelding.html, [Access date: September
14, 2005].
35
Gelding, “My Life as a Eunuch,” interview with Bob Whitby, SFWeekly.com, June
28, 2000, http://www.sfweekly.com/Issues/2000-06-28/news/feature2.html, [Accessdate: September 14, 2005].
36
ibid.
37
Those men who dream of being castrated by a woman, in contrast, address their
desire to The (unbarred) Woman; that is, the phallic Mother.
38
ibid.
39
ibid.
40
Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular
Culture, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 23.
41
Gelding’s regret separates him from Edward Bodkin, who, in his blind devotion tofollowing his own jouissance, sought more to be the primal Father rather than to invokethat ﬁgure.
42
Farrell Squire, “Tell Me: Why are You into Castration?” online posting, January 5,
2002, http://www.eunuch.org, [Access date: September 14, 2005].
43
See photos at http://www.eunuch.org [Access date: September 14, 2005].
44
For an interview with a would-be cutter who advocates the right to choose castration and the legal licensing of cutters, see: Matthew A., “Luvpain99: Well, It’s Been
Quite a Year,” interview with Chris Clark, Body Modiﬁcation Ezine, January 8, 2005,
http://www.bmezine.com/news/guest/20050108.html, [Access date September 14,2005].
45
Dr. Spector’s clinic, which offers legal access to castration surgery without pre-castration psychiatric evaluation while persisting in its spurious promise to grant the eunuch
calm, is a further example of this need for full symbolic recognition of the eunuch identity.
27