Fragment of a Case of Posthysteria:

D’or Owns the Jewel

Shannon Bell
York University

A major radical transformation from the nineteenth-century

hysteric to the twenty-first-century posthysteric is a transformation in
discourse and, of course, in the agency embedded in that discourse.
In this narration Dora becomes the posthysteric D’Or. The French
meaning of the name D’or is golden. Freud gave his star hysteric the name
of his sister’s maidservant, Dora (O’Neill 80). Lacan refers to Dora and
two other hysterical patients as “mouths of gold” for the knowledge Freud
gathered from them (Lacan xvii 99). It is said of the name D’or that:
People with this name tend to initiate events, to be lead-
ers rather than followers, with powerful personalities. They
tend to be focused on specific goals, experience a wealth of
creative new ideas, and have the ability to implement these
ideas with efficiency and determination. They tend to be
courageous and sometimes aggressive. As unique, creative
individuals, they tend to resent authority, and are sometimes
stubborn, proud, and impatient. (www.sheknows.com/baby-
names/name/d’or)
The name alteration indicates that the posthysteric has gone beyond
the hysteric’s positioning as a servant to Freud and psychoanalysis: in the

ESC 40.1 (March 2014): 189–210

 nineteenth century, the tracks of psychoanalysis were laid on the back of
the hysteric. In the twenty-first century the posthysteric drives a gold spike
through these tracks and in so doing reroutes the way and destination.
Shannon Bell is a In the name alteration, the missing a that changes Dora to D’or is the a
Professor of Political of object a, the truth position in Lacan’s famous four discourses. Object
Science at York a is embodied in D’or as the agent who occupies the discourse positions
University, of Master s1, Analyst a, and University s2, in addition to the position of
www.yorku.ca/shanbell. Hysteric $. This, of course, changes the agent position of the barred subject
Bell is a performance $ of the hysteric to the posthysteric position that blends the structural
philosopher who lives positions of truth/agent/production/other into a new agency that can be
and writes philosophy- written as a-$-s2-s1 and a new discourse: the Discourse of the Posthysteric.
in-action. Her books In presenting the case of D’or I take my utterances regarding the case
include Fast Feminism and the assertion of my interpreted scenarios as reality; this is to say that
(2010), Reading, Writing what I in the dominant position of the Master (s1) detail about D’or in
and Rewriting the subsection 4, “Eighteen year old D’or,” is presented as objective fact and I
Prostitute Body (1994), refuse to acknowledge that the scenarios derived are constructed. What
Whore Carnival (1995), I in the position analyst (a) in subsection 5, “D’or Owns the Jewel: D’or
Bad Attitude/s on Trial, and Female Ejaculatory Agency,” re-member is accomplished through the
co-authored (1997), postmodern techniques of queering and speed; what I in the dominant
Subversive Itinerary: The position of Knowledge (s2) in subsection 5 reveal is the techné of female
Thought of Gad Horowitz, ejaculation; and, what I in the dominant position of posthysteric ($) bring
co-edited (2013), forth in subsections 4 and 5 is an ownership of the female phallus by pro-
and New Socialisms, viding the blade for the hysteric’s double-edged sword questions: “What
co-edited (2004). is the female organ?” “What is it to be a woman?” (Lacan iii 171). It is
the additional third question that D’or asks, “How to [female] ejaculate?,”
which reworks the hysteric’s two questions and in so doing not only brings
the “the master to heel” (Lacan xviii, x, 11), which the hysteric was capable
of doing, but also brings psychoanalysis to its knees.

A Matheme in which the hysteric $/s1/s2/a becomes posthys-

teric a-$-s2-s1
This subsection sets out 1) the formal structure of Lacan’s Four Discourses,
paying particular attention to the vectors or arrows of the circuit, 2) the
matheme of Lacan’s Discourse of the Hysteric, and 3) my matheme of the
Discourse of the Posthysteric.

190 | Bell
Formal Structure (Lacan xx 17 and Lacan, Milan Lecture)

Agent 1  Other 4

--------   --------
 3 5
2 Truth Production
The one speaking, the agent, addresses herself to the other (arrow 1) from
the truth sustaining the speaker agent (arrow 2). The truth through symp-
toms of daily life (slips of the tongue, faulty actions) and also pathological
symptoms addresses itself indirectly to the other (arrow 3). The other
responds to the subject with a production that can be linguistic and other
than linguistic (arrow 4). The produced effect returns to the discursive
agent (arrow 5) and the circuit starts again (Gendrault 7, Bryant 40–44).
For a change of discourse to occur the terms of the discourse rotate
clockwise one position forward as in the transition from the Master’s
Discourse to the Hysteric’s Discourse, the Hysteric’s Discourse to the Ana-
lyst’s Discourse, the Analyst’s Discourse to the University Discourse and
the University Discourse to the Master’s Discourse; the terms can also
rotate counter-clockwise as in transition from the University Discourse
back to the Analyst Discourse or from the Analyst’s Discourse back to the
Hysteric’s Discourse, and so on.
The terms, algebraic symbols, signify as follows:
s1, the master signifier: can be anything from the master, the father, the
leader, the female ejaculator, from proper names to key ideological signi-
fiers like freedom, democracy, Canada, the environment, we, and others.
s2: knowledge, know-how, technology
$: the subject divided between consciousness and unconsciousness,
male and female, alienated subjects, subjects subordinated to other sub-
jects
a: surplus jouissance or surplus enjoyment, the lost object

Discourse of the Hysteric

$ (hysteric) 1  s1 (master) 4

--------   --------
 3 5
2 a (surplus s2 (know-how, science, technology)
productive desire)

Fragment of a Case | 191
Discourse of the Posthysteric

a (surplus 1 $ (hysteric)
productive desire) 4

------   --------
 3 5
2 s1 (master) s2 (know-how,
science, technology)

In the Discourse of the Hysteric, the agent, the one who speaks
addresses herself to the position of other that is occupied by the master.
The truth driving the hysteric’s discourse is a desire to know, a desire for
knowledge of jouissance; the hysteric’s symptoms—vision abnormalities,
blindness, spasms or neurasthenia, sexual dysfunction, speech impedi-
ments, biting the tongue, nausea, rapid palpitations, multiple personalities,
fugue states, absences and amnesia, hallucinations, temporary paralysis,
thumb-sucking, and the involuntary passing of urine (Freud, “Some Gen-
eral Remarks” 101)—address themselves directly to the master who in the
structural position of other responds with a type of technological know-
how—the talking cure, free association, and dream analysis—at the core
of the science of psychoanalysis. The produced effect of the deployment of
technological skill (the product) returns to the agent and the circuit starts
again. However, it is impossible for the techniques of psychoanalysis to
produce the sought after knowledge of object a that drives the Hysteric’s
Discourse because object a is outside language.
The Discourse of the Posthysteric is a completely different territory
outside and excess to what Levi Bryant dubs “The Universe of Mastery”
which is the playground of all Four Discourses (44). The vector of the
Posthysteric Discourse is a$s2s1a.
One notices five interesting features of the Discourse of the Posthys-
teric:
1. The matheme of the Posthysteric Discourse comes into being by
inverting the position of truth in the Hysteric’s Discourse; that is, by plac-
ing a in the agent position which it occupies in the Analyst’s Discourse.
2. The Hysteric $ rotates one turn forward to the position of the Other
which was the Master’s position in the Hysteric’s Discourse and which is
the Hysteric’s position in the Analyst’s Discourse.
3. s2, know-how and science, stays in the same position as it is in the
Hysteric’s Discourse; however, it is producing know-how, technology, and

192 | Bell
science for object a occupying the agent position and not for the hysterical
subject $; the hysterical subject $, in the position of Other, is addressed by
an object a that contains both the knowledge of jouissance that the hysteric
is seeking and the techne—skill and know-how—of how to attain it.
4. The master s1 reverses one position to where it is in the University
Discourse and is in the structural position of a driving the discourse. The
master’s desire to own and control sustains and meshes with the hysteric’s
desire to know through vectors 1, 2, and 3.
5. In none of the four discourses comprising the Universe of Mastery
is skill and know-how delivered to object a via vector 4 as it is in the dis-
course of the Posthysteric.

What Dora and Hysteria as represented by Freud gave to the

posthysteric
For the future posthysteric Freud’s key contribution to the theory of hys-
teria was sixfold. First, he made a connection between Dora’s hysterical
symptoms and the secretion of female fluids and linked “abnormal secre-
tions” with hysteria. In what became the defining citation from his work
on hysteria Freud writes:
The pride taken by some women in the appearance of their
genitals is quite a special feature of their vanity; … disorders of
genitals … inspire feelings of repugnance or even disgust [and]
have an incredible power of humiliating them, of lowering
their self-esteem and of making them irritable, sensitive and
distrustful. An abnormal secretion of the mucous membrane
of the vagina is looked upon as a source of disgust. (Freud,
“Fragment of an Analysis” 121).

Second, in “Some General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks,” Freud discloses

the source of female hysteria: “a boyish nature” (102). Woman emerges
when female masculinity is repressed, when the masculine active girl is
fully Oedipalized into the passive feminine woman. Freud observes:
[H]ysterical attacks, like hysteria in general, revive a piece of
sexual activity in women which existed during their childhood
and at that time revealed an essentially masculine character.
It can often be observed that girls who have shown a boy-
ish nature and inclinations up to the years before puberty are
precisely those who become hysterical from puberty onwards.
(“Some General Remarks” 102)

Fragment of a Case | 193
 Interestingly, it can be assumed that Freud’s work with Dora in 1901
and its publication in 1905 contributed to the production of this observa-
tion. In fact, it seems to be this phenomenological body experience of loss
that underpins Dora’s two questions as identified by Lacan from Freud’s
narration: What is it to be a woman? and specifically, What is the feminine
organ? (iii 172)
What is repressed in becoming woman, according to Freud, is active
female sexuality. It is widely accepted that “masculine character” and “boy-
ish inclination” for Freud are, among other things, signifiers for masturba-
tion. In his analysis of Dora’s first dream in which “a house was on fire,”
Dora’s “father was standing beside her bed and woke her up,” her mother
“wanted to stop and save her jewel-case” (“Fragment of an Analysis” 99);
Freud sees Dora as “about to reveal to him a childhood secret, presum-
ably her masturbatory behavior” (O’Neill 73). Of course, according to
Freud, “the wish which creates the dream always springs from the period
of childhood” (“Fragment of an Analysis” 107). Freud pieces elements of
the dream—fire and jewel case—together to allude to “an event in child-
hood” (107). The event, of course, is masturbation. What is interesting for
the posthysteric D’or and all posthysterics is the linkage Freud makes and
tells Dora regarding “children being forbidden to play with matches” not
on account of fire but due to the fear “that if they do they will wet their bed”
(107). Freud suggests to Dora, “Perhaps it is believed that they will dream
of fire and then try and put it out with water” (107). He further contends
that Dora’s “mother wanted to save the jewel-case [not] so that it should
not be burnt” but, rather, in terms of dream-thought analysis, so that
“the jewel-case not be … wetted” (107–08). Freud interprets Dora’s dream
image of her father standing over her bed and the father’s dream state-
ment, “I refuse to let my two children go to their destruction” (108)—“be
burnt for the sake of your jewel-case” (99) as Dora and her brother being
“addicted to bed-wetting up to a later age than is usual with children” (108).
Bedwetting could also be taken to be ejaculation—liquid fire—particularly
in the female form that is so copious that it can be deployed to put out
fire; in the nineteenth and first three-quarters of the twentieth century it
was pathologized as urinary incontinence.1
Third, not only are the manifest symptoms of hysteria an enacted or
“pantomimed” (Freud, “Some General Remarks” 97) “compromise between
a libidinal and a repressing impulse” (Freud, “Hysterical Phantasies” 93),

1 See Ladas, Whipple, and Perry, Bell, “Liquid Fire,” and Bell, “The Female Phallus,
Something to See,” Fast Feminism.

194 | Bell
 the symptoms “may also represent a union of two libidinal phantasies of
an opposite sexual character” (93). It gets better; the innate bisexual nature
of human beings that is a blend of active and passive aims and actions
comes to the body surface of the hysteric. Freud cites a case of a hysteric
who “pressed her dress up against her body with one hand (as the woman),
while she tried to tear it off with the other (as the man)” (94). This allows
Freud to claim that “hysterical symptoms are the expression on the one
hand of a masculine unconscious sexual phantasy, and on the other hand
of a feminine one” (93).
Fourth, Freud claims that hysteria is very much due to women’s fear of
the erect penis encountered indirectly through its outline in tight trousers:
“The subject of erection solves some of the most interesting hysterical
symptoms. The attention that women pay to the outline of men’s genitals
as seen through their clothing becomes, when it has been repressed, a
source of the very frequent cases of avoiding company and of dreading
society” (“Fragment of an Analysis” n1). The male erection as a source of
the hysteric’s dread of society and the hysteric’s fascination with the male
erection sets the scene for the posthysteric’s female erection and ejacula-
tion through the organ that “performs the function of micturition as well
as … sexual function,” just like “the male member” (62). In response to
Dora’s recollection of her bodily revulsion and recurrent choking and
nausea following Herr K.’s carefully orchestrated kiss and embrace in his
empty office, Freud writes: “I have formed in my own mind the following
reconstruction of the scene. I believe that during the man’s passionate
embrace she felt not merely his kiss upon her lips but also the pressure
of his erect member against her body” (60). Unintentionally, Freud, in a
way, foreshadows the female erection when he opines: “The pressure of the
erect member probably led to an analogous change in the corresponding
female organ, the clitoris; and the excitation of this second erotogenic zone
was referred by a process of displacement to the simultaneous pressure
against the thorax and became fixed there” (61).
It is the “analogous change in the corresponding female organ, the
clitoris” that Freud takes to be troubling Dora, which is of most interest
to the posthysteric. One wonders if Freud had somehow foreseen what
became in the late twentieth century, thanks to the Feminist Women’s
Health Centers (fwhc), a new view of the clitoris that extends the visible
external structure, the glans of the clitoris, to incorporate the internal
spongy erectile tissue on the top and bottom vaginal walls, producing a
blended external and internal erection of similar size to that of the male
member. Certainly if Dora’s unified external/internal clitoris became erect

Fragment of a Case | 195
 as the analogous change in the female organ and she didn’t know what it
was, this erection could take her breath away and produce symptoms of
choking and nausea. And, how could Dora know what the internal female
erection was? There was no documentation of it in the family encyclopedia
or the more exciting book Physiology of Love by Paolo Mantegazza that
she was reading with Frau K. at the K.’s house on the lake.
Fifth, Freud presents Dora as desiring sexual knowledge that is never
fully provided, not by the family encyclopedia, nor by the Physiology of
Love and books of that nature, and not by her intimate talks with Frau K.
with whom Dora shares a bedroom when she stays with Frau and Herr K.
at the lake. We learn from Freud that Dora “had been the wife’s confidante
and advisor in all the difficulties of her married life. There was nothing they
had not talked about” (“Fragment of an Analysis” 96). It is with Frau K., the
wife of the man who assaults Dora with a kiss and an erect member, whom
Dora reads Mantegazza and discusses “forbidden topics” (97). John O’Neill,
in “Opening the Dora Case (1905 [1901]),” queries “What is the knowledge
that Dora needs of (from) men?” (72). This is an excellent question. Freud
provides three clues that when combined give one a good idea of what
knowledge is needed. There is 1) Dora’s fascination and revulsion with
the erect member; 2) her obsession with liquidity—bedwetting as a child,
“abnormal vaginal secretions,” “the kind of getting wet involved in sexual
intercourse” (Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis” 128), “man present[ing]
woman with something liquid in the form of drops” (128); and, 3) not so
much the jewel case present in her first dream and as a gift given to her by
Herr K. (Freud points out to Dora that “ ‘jewel-case’ [‘Schmuck-kästchen’]
is a favorite expression … for the female genitals,” 105) but the jewellery
itself as evidenced by her refusal to wear jewellery since her illness, her
mother’s desire for the “pearl drops to wear in her ears” (104) that were
denied as a gift by the father, and the gift from her father of “some jewellery
which was exactly like some that she had seen” in the possession of Frau K.
(97)—her father’s mistress, Dora’s at-the-lake roommate, and the wife of
Dora’s seducer. It seems that when one combines the erect member, bodily
liquidity, and the refusal, denial, and acceptance of various exchanges of
jewellery among various triangulated persons one could conclude that the
knowledge Dora requires is about the sexual workings of her jewel or gem
located outside/inside her jewel case in terms of how to make it erect and
bring about its detumescence through the ejaculation of fluid.
Perhaps it is Freud’s reasoning in his postscript to “Fragment of An
Analysis of A Case of Hysteria (Dora)” that really gives the posthysteric

196 | Bell
of the next century carte blanche. Freud reasons, “The symptoms of the
disease are nothing else than the patient’s sexual activity” (156).
The hysteric resists through her body—a body incompletely Oedipal-
ized and gendered. The hysteric’s body speaks through vision abnormali- It is Lacan’s
ties, blindness, spasms or neurasthenia, sexual dysfunction, speech imped-
iments, biting the tongue, nausea, rapid palpitations, multiple personalities, laying bare of
fugue states, absences and amnesia, hallucinations, temporary paralysis,
thumb-sucking, and the involuntary passing of urine. In an exquisite sexual the structural
encounter a posthysteric can experience fourteen of these phenomena.
And, if coming with a female daddy’s full fist in your pussy as you contract rules of the
and release your pussy muscles until you drench her pecs and forearm
with liquid fire counts as symptomatic of sexual dysfunction, then fifteen game that sets
symptoms of hysteria are also features of active female sexuality (Bell, Fast
Feminism 74). The symptom omitted is nausea. Dora on her
There are conflicting portraits of Dora and debate as to whether hys-
teria is resistance or failure, the most famous being those of Hélène Cix- way out of the
ous and Catherine Clément. The hysteric as represented by Freud and
produced by Lacan paved the way for the posthysteric. The hysteric is circuit of the
simultaneously woman and man, and, “she is the name of a certain force
which makes the little circus not work anymore” (Cixous quoted in O’Neill Universe of
77–79). What the hysteric is incapable of doing is “taking flight,” as Clé-
ment contends (quoted in O’Neill 77). She claims, “What she broke was Mastery toward
strictly individual and limited” (79). It is not at all clear what Clément
means to say here. It is the posthysteric who takes flight from the Universe becoming D’or.
of Mastery producing her own matheme and discourse and that is in no
small part due to the fact she is involved in an expanding public collective
enunciation.
While the hysteric resisted through her body, the posthysteric resists
through a public (discourse and politics) and private (sexual practice)
refusal to accept the female body as it has been constructed. Lacan’s pro-
duction of Dora and the hysteric made ready the scene for the posthysteric
with her own discourse to emerge.

Lacan’s production of Dora

It is Lacan’s laying bare of the structural rules of the game that sets Dora
on her way out of the circuit of the Universe of Mastery toward becom-
ing D’or. Relying on Hegel’s Master-Slave bond to structure the four dis-
courses, Lacan provides a structural opening for the barred subject $ to
bring down the Master s1; in the case of the hysteric as barred subject $
it is by unmasking the castration of the master. Not only can the master

Fragment of a Case | 197
not appropriate the hysteric’s surplus a, the master can not figure the
nature of this surplus jouissance and is left playing in the terrain of the
jewel case, Freud’s marker for Oedipalized heterosexual relations. In the
discourse of the master “the female sex is characterized by an absence, a
void, a hole, which means that it happens to be less desirable than is the
male sex” (iii 177). While the master can only desire to control that which
he cannot know, the hysteric desires to know. According to Lacan’s read-
ing of Freud’s Dora:
When Dora finds herself wondering, What is a woman?, she is
attempting to symbolize the female organ as such. Her iden-
tification with the man, bearer of the penis, is for her on this
occasion a means of approaching this definition that escapes
her. She literally uses the penis as an imaginary instrument
for apprehending what she hasn’t succeeded in symbolizing.
(iii 178)

Since “the symbolic is what yields us the entire world system” (Lacan
iii 177), it is necessary that the hysteric have the words to reposition the
phallus/penis from “an imaginary instrument” to its place as an essential
component of the female sex organ and that this be done in words. “It is
because man has words that he has knowledge of things” (Lacan iii 177).
Yet, the hysteric, “industrious as she is” (Lacan xvii 34), is unable to pro-
duce words that reveal “the magnitude of what she as woman is capable
of revealing concerning jouissance” (34).
Lacan claims that she is unable to do so because “this is not what mat-
ters to the hysteric. What matters to her is that that other called a man
know what a precious object she becomes in this context of discourse”
(Lacan xvii 34). But what if it is “what matters to the hysteric”? Lacan
produces the hysteric as “a logician” (xviii, ix 15). But the logo-hysteric
must circulate in his four discourses. It is the structural rule of the game.
Another structural rule of the game is that “any gender being analyzed …
[is] obliged to pass through the hysteric’s discourse,… this is the law, the
rule of the game” (Lacan xvii 33).
Lacan, well-heeled by Kojève’s reading of Hegel, notes that “when a
slave has redeemed [racheté] himself he is a master only in that he has
begun to risk everything” (xvii 82). It is the hysteric’s excessive risk in her
endeavour to know jouissance that seduces both Freud and Lacan and
provides the momentum for the posthysteric’s breaking of the circuit of
the four discourses.

198 | Bell
 The hysteric’s desire for knowledge and the recognition of her jouis-
sance is perhaps Lacan’s desire for her as well. For Lacan says, “It begins
with a tickle and ends in a blaze of petrol. That’s always what jouissance is”
(xvii 72). But, of course, inside the structure of the four discourses, the
object of desire, object a, can never be attained. “A blaze of petrol”—liquid
fire. In Dora’s first dream a house is on fire and her mother wants to rescue
her jewel case before leaving; in the House of Lacan D’or lets the structure
go, escaping with her jewel and liquid fire.

Eighteen-year-old D’or
“The family circle of the eighteen-year-old girl who is the subject of this
paper included, besides herself, her two parents,” a close older female
mentor, and two female housemates (Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis”
48). D’or was spending the summer of 1973 in her aunt and uncle’s winter
house; her live-in companions were two female friends of the same age;
the location was a small North American Midwest city surrounded by a
rural hinterland. The young women were virgins and quite interested in the
slightly older young men in town, university students from other areas of
the country, employed to work on a new section of a natural gas pipeline.
Following an evening of dancing at a local venue, D’or and one of her
housemates returned home each with a young man. D’or’s housemate and
her guest retired to a bedroom. D’or and her young man Herr D. remained
in the kitchen; D’or was sitting on Herr D.’s lap kissing him; suddenly a
body movement occurred with which she had no familiarity nor knowl-
edge: “[D]uring the man’s passionate embrace she felt not merely his kiss
upon her lips but also the pressure of his erect member against her body”;
“The pressure of the erect member probably led to an analogous change in
[her] corresponding female organ” (Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis” 60,
61). Whether it was fear of Herr D.’s erect member pushing through his
clothing or her erect member equally yet differently pushing through her
locked jewel case and her clothing, D’or temporarily froze. As the paralysis
lifted, she bit her tongue, pushed him away with her arms, and said “ ‘get
out.’ ” Herr D. reacted angrily with the words: “ ‘You are frigid,’ ” adding as
he left, “ ‘just like this table.’ ” Herr D. had diagnosed D’or as having a sexual
dysfunction—frigidity—which in dsm-v (2013) becomes “female sexual
interest/arousal disorder” (IsHak and Tobia 2013). Not for a moment did
Herr D. consider that perhaps D’or’s jewel case remained closed because
he held an incorrect key.
D’or threw up in response to the physiological fear state and her terror
of sexual dysfunction; she entered a fugue state for a period of seven hours,

Fragment of a Case | 199
during which she also suffered aphonia and crying convulsions. Frau J.,
D’or’s teacher and confidante, sixteen years older than her, was summoned.
It could be said that rather than “[a] romantic and sentimental friendship
with one of her school friends” D’or had this with Frau J., “accompanied
by vows, kisses, promises of eternal correspondence” (Freud, “Fragment
of an Analysis” 52).
All D’or can remember is waking to Frau J.’s voice as if in a dream state.
D’or never could recall what Frau J. said to her. Like Dora and Frau K.,
during the course of their relationship, “[t]here was nothing they had not
talked about,” including Frau J.’s love for and sexual relations with Herr
Z. Herr Z.’s attempted seduction of D’or had introduced “jealousy” into
Frau J. and D’or’s friendship. All D’or could recollect was telling Frau J.
that she wished that she had been Herr D., that she had been D’or’s first
sexual encounter, that it had been Frau J. who had been kissing her and
not the young man Herr D. It wasn’t simply, as Freud suggested, that D’or,
as a result of the disgust produced by a failed heterosexual encounter and
her “energetic suppression” via conversion into hysterical symptoms of
her physiological body responses during this encounter, “redirected her
libido towards women” (53). No, D’or was conscious that she loved and
desired Frau J. and that it was the sexual libido of this desire that she was
redirecting toward men.
D’or’s amnesia for the dream-like time she spent with Frau J. in the
early morning perhaps was the source of inspiration for D’or hastening
into action that very evening. Having been labeled frigid, D’or, determined
to refute that label, went to a bar where she spotted a young man on his
own who possibly would facilitate her loss of frigidity. D’or walked over
to his table, said hello, and stated her case: “ ‘I am a virgin, will you teach
me how to have sex?’ ” It is this active initiative coupled with this question
that set D’or on the trajectory of the posthysteric “how to …” The young
man, in that golden moment, responded, “ ‘Yeah,’ ” and he did, beginning
that evening. The full lesson continued a few weeks later at the end of
the summer when for a week D’or and the young man G’ord traveled to a
lake amidst a sea of agricultural land, set themselves up in a tent, and did
sexual positions, including a sexual scenario at a deserted summer youth
camp, Camp Wannakumbac. It was the end of the summer, the leaves were
golden; D’or had repositioned from a frigid virgin to a sexual adventurer
and had taken her first step on the path of posthysteria. D’or was eighteen.
In fact, she had just turned eighteen two days before her first failed sexual
encounter and three days before her second achieved sexual encounter.

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 It was the “how” question, “Will you teach me how to have sex?,” that
repositioned and redirected D’or from hysteric to posthysteric. Over the
years the “how” question developed to include: “Will you teach me how
to orgasm?” And, then, “How do you ejaculate?” A question D’or asked It was the mid-
every man she had a sexual encounter with until one man was both able to
articulate how to and show her the process. It was the mid-1980s—female 1980s—female
ejaculation was soon to be on the sexual map.
ejaculation was
D’or owns the jewel: D’or and female ejaculatory agency
I wrote the first set of instructions on how to female ejaculate in “Q: What soon to be on
Shoots and Sprays, Shoots and Sprays, Shoots and Sprays? A: A Woman”
published, as the feature article for the International Women’s Day issue the sexual map.
of the lesbian magazine Rites in 1989.2 The issue included black-and-white
images of me doing two different types of female ejaculation—the spurt-
ing gush and the jet stream—and two texts, one which traced the geneal-
ogy of female ejaculation and one entitled “The Everywoman’s Guide to
Ejaculation,” which provided step-by-step directions on how to ejaculate:
Step One: Find what has come to be known as your G-spot;
don’t call it that, it is named after Gräfenberg, a man. It is the
muscle and spongy tissue around that part of your urethra that
is on the top wall of your vagina. It is about half a finger (more
or less) inside your vagina and about a finger across—about
two inches. If the muscles that go around your vagina have not
been used too much (mine weren’t) they have to be built up.
The muscles can be built up by doing contractions: pressing
the top of your vagina against the bottom and releasing. Don’t
worry: Strong muscles will not hold the penis in place; they
will push it out when your ducts get full and you want to shoot.
Step Two: Using whichever hand you usually masturbate
with, take two or three fingers and rub them against the part
of your urethra inside your vagina. Press hard and notice the
feeling of having to pee. You don’t, this is the signal that you
are ready to ejaculate. Now, place the middle finger slightly
below the external part of your urethra and begin to mastur-
bate the same way you rub your clit. As you are doing this you
will notice the two ducts, one at each side of your urethra, feel
full and perhaps somewhat painful; you have another 30 or so

2 This article was reprinted as “Feminist Ejaculations” in Kroker, as Bell, “Female

Ejaculation,” and as Bell, “Kvinnerspruter de ogsa!” This originally appeared as
a monologue in the video Nice Girls Don’t Do It and was first published as “The
Everywoman’s Guide to Ejaculation.”

Fragment of a Case | 201
 ducts scattered in the urethral sponge on the top wall of your
vagina. Once you get into the body feeling you may be able
to locate them externally on your lower abdomen. They are
located in a pyramid from your clit to just near your ovaries.
Step Three: Take your other hand and press down on one
or more of the ducts from the outside. Push your urethra out
and push the way you do when you pee. A crucial aspect of
ejaculating is that it is necessary to push out. Liquid will
come shooting out perhaps in a steady stream or jet.
I can ejaculate only in positions in which I can push my
entire pelvis out and up: on my knees with legs a foot and a half
apart; on my back with my ass raised up, weight distributed
on my feet and shoulders, and knees at least two feet apart;
squatting, standing, again with feet far enough apart so I can
push my urethra up and out. As a veteran ejaculator, following
stimulation on my urethra and urethral sponge I can ejaculate
by just pushing out.
If your partner is female, you may be able to help her ejacu-
late. As you stimulate her anterior vaginal wall and the exterior
part of her urethra, get her to push out when she is ready. You
will both feel the glands and ducts around the urethra swelling
and filling with liquid.
What ejaculation will do for you sexually is to give you a
powerful kinesthetic, visual, and auditory experience—a total
body experience. You can repeat it almost indefinitely once
your body awakens to it. Seeing and hearing your body fluid
put out fire gives one a whole new relation to the environment.
The ejaculate changes in amount, color, odor and taste during
your menstrual cycle. At ovulation the fluid is very hot (it cor-
responds to your vaginal temperature), thick, yellowish and
pungent. Following ovulation the fluid is thinner, there is more
of it, it is clear and pleasantly salty. It remains this way until
bleeding starts at which point it is again thick for the first day
or so. It then returns to being clear and copious. I have found
that ejaculation during ovulation—because it reduces vaginal
temperature—reduces yeast infections that result from the
increase in vaginal temperature at ovulation.3

3 This originally appeared as a monologue in the video Nice Girls Don’t Do It and
was first published as “The Everywoman’s Guide to Ejaculation.”

202 | Bell
 Later in 1989, filmmaker Kath Daymond and I did Nice Girls Don’t
Do It, the first film on female ejaculation.4 It was a thirteen-minute truth
pastiche of knowledge, porn, and technical instruction.
This is not to say that female ejaculation did not exist before the end of
the 1980s. On the contrary, female ejaculation has a long history. This his-
tory has been retrospectively reformulated as the popular culture geneal-
ogy of female ejaculation. Make no mistake, if D’or and her queer feminist
political militant friends had not ruptured the old order of female sexuality
with new knowledge and practices, female ejaculation would not have
become a regular part of feminine jouissance. Rather, female ejaculation
would have continued to suffer the fate of what Michel Foucault termed
“subjugated knowledge”: it would appear for a moment now and then in a
specific discourse (philosophy, medicine, pornography, sexology) only to
be submerged out of view for extended periods of time throughout history.
While female bodies have ejaculated throughout history, female ejacu-
lation was not what Alain Badiou terms a truth-event and Lacan calls
a discourse, “a social bond, founded in language” (xx 21), until it was
enunciated in multiple sites of queer feminist discourse that collectively
and retrospectively rendered obsolete the hegemonic markings of the
female body as submissive to the pleasures and desires of the male body.
As Badiou notes, “the event renders prior markings obsolete” (23).
Female ejaculation is an incredibly powerful physiological experience
and image of the sexual female body. To see fluid shooting with velocity
and forced out of the glands and ducts that surround the urethra—what
is called the “urethral sponge” of the clitoris, now officially the “female
prostate”—through the vaginal opening, provides a new script for female
sexuality and repositions the female body as powerful, active, and autono-
mous. Female ejaculation educator Deborah Sundahl suggests, “this is con-
nectable to a broadening of women’s social and sexual roles” (Bell, Whore
Carnival 273). I say, “[t]he visual image of female ejaculation relieves the
phallus of its patriarchal burden” (273–74).

A new female body5

The paradigm shift in knowledge about and representations of female
sexuality began with A New View of a Woman’s Body (1981), compiled by
the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers (fwhc), which in a
brilliant political move redefined the clitoris, extending its visible exter-
4 The earliest feminist representation of female ejaculation was part of a larger
lesbian erotic film, Clips, produced by Blush Entertainment Group (1988).
5 See Bell, “The Female Phallus, Something to See,” Fast Feminism, 53–57.

Fragment of a Case | 203
nal structure, the glans of the clitoris, to incorporate the internal spongy
erectile tissue on the top and bottom vaginal walls. The fwhc named the
tissue on the top wall of the vagina the “urethral sponge” and the spongy
tissue on the bottom wall, the “perineal sponge” (fwhc 43–45). During
sexual excitement, the urethral and perineal sponges become engorged
and erect; the paraurethral glands and ducts in the urethral sponge fill
with prostatic and other fluid which can be ejaculated through the urethra.
In the terms of Badiou and Lacan, this shift would not merely constitute
a new view of a pre-existing body, a change in an already existing body;
rather, it would constitute a new body, produced by new discursive sub-
jects in a new discourse: the discourse of the posthysteric.
The fwhc’s A New View of a Woman’s Body provided drawings of the
clitoral structure in flaccid and erect states. These drawings make appar-
ent the similarity in size and structure of the male and female sex organs.
Directed by Mary Jane Sherfey’s 1972 point-by-point comparison of cli-
toral and penile anatomy, the fwhc rediscovered and defined the female
clitoris pragmatically through consciousness-raising sessions and shared
intimate experiences that included participants taking off their clothes
to compare genital anatomy and documenting each other masturbating.
By doing so they acquired the practical knowledge presented in Susan
Gage’s now-famous anatomical illustrations of the urethral sponge of the
clitoris, complete with erectile tissue and paraurethral glands and ducts
(Chalker 33–34).
In The g Spot (1981), Alice Khan Ladas, Beverly Whipple, and John D.
Perry extended the paradigm shift of the new view of the female body into
the realm of heterosexual popular culture, coining the term g spot after
Gräfenberg to refer to the urethral sponge. The g spot had wider currency
than the urethral sponge as it implies a secret spot that, once located, will
unleash the female body’s possibilities for pleasure. The authors describe
the g spot as “a spot inside the vagina that is extremely sensitive to deep
pressure. It lies on the anterior wall of the vagina … when properly stimu-
lated, the Gräfenberg spot swells and leads to orgasm in many women”
(1–2). The g Spot makes two significant contributions to contemporary
studies on female ejaculation: 1) it presents the female sexual organ as a
unified organ, leaving behind the artificial division of the female genitals
into clitoris and vagina which was so popular with Freud, Kinsey, and
Masters and Johnson, in which either vaginal or clitoral orgasms were
privileged, and 2) it popularizes female ejaculation, although it does not
disclose how to do it.

204 | Bell
 The third key contribution, although first chronologically, to the para-
digm shift in understanding and representing the female sex organ was
by Josephine Sevely, who in 1978 co-authored with J. W. Bennett the first
article on female ejaculation and the female prostate, “Concerning Female
Ejaculation and the Female Prostate,” in the Journal of Sex Research. Sevely
and Bennett claimed that the tissue surrounding the female urethra was
the same as that surrounding the male urethra and contained thirty or
more prostatic glands. They also provided the lost genealogy of female
ejaculation, from ancient philosophy and medicine until 1950s sexology.
Sevely extended her theories about female sexuality into Eve’s Secrets
(1987), but it never achieved the popularity of The g Spot. Eve’s Secrets
emphasizes the simultaneous involvement of the clitoris, urethra, and
vagina (the cuv) as a single integrated sex organ. The implications of this
theory are twofold: first, a woman’s sexual organ is viewed as an integrated
whole, not split between clitoral activity and vaginal passivity; second, the
anatomical alternative between male and female genitals is challenged by
a new construction of anatomical symmetry. Both female and male bod-
ies have prostate gland structures and both have the potential to ejaculate
fluids during sexual stimulation. The female body can ejaculate fluid from
thirty or more ducts, and with stimulation it can ejaculate repeatedly. It
can ejaculate more fluid than the male body and enjoy a plurality of genital
pleasure sites: the clitoris, urethra, vagina, the vaginal entrance, the top
and bottom walls of the vagina, and the cervix.
We now know that the female sex organ is very similar to the male’s in
structure and function—that is, the urethral sponge is capable of anywhere
from a three- to eight-inch erection, measures a handful in circumference,
and that prostatic and other bodily fluids are ejaculated from the paraure-
thral glands and ducts through the urethra. What then is it that prevents
recognition of body symmetry and body equality? Quite likely a large part
of this lack of recognition is due to the historical invisibility of the female
sex organ as an integrated unit and the subsequent lack of symmetry in
our male-dominated cultures of naming or the symbolic encoding of the
female and male sex organs.
Terminology is important. Milan Zaviacic, professor of Pathology and
Forensic Medicine at the Comenius University of Bratislava in Slovakia,
fought for twenty years to get the International Committee on Anatomical
Terminology to recognize the female prostate as a functioning anatomical
structure: “It appears to be illogical to use the term prostate for the tissue
in the male and a different term (Skene’s glands and ducts of paraurethral
glands and ducts) for the same tissue in the female. The use of the term

Fragment of a Case | 205
 Skene’s paraurethral glands and ducts wrongly implies that some other
structure rather than the prostate is involved” (120).
Naming is important. There are significant power differentials inherent
The feminist in the naming of the female sex organ: alternately the urethral sponge, g
spot, female prostate, and what I choose to name it, the female phallus
turn of the (“The Female Phallus: Something to See,” Fast Feminism). As Lacan says:
“the symbolic is what yields us the entire world system. It is because man
technology for has words that he has knowledge of things” (iii 177).
In the video How to Female Ejaculate (1992), Sundahl conducts a
viewing a cervical self-examination. She shows the internal erection by turning
the speculum sideways and inserting it inside the vagina. It is only with
woman’s sex the turning of the speculum that the full internal and external clitoris
becomes fully visible, thus also turning the female sex from the absence
generates a of nothing to see into the presence of something to see. The speculum,
a technology developed by gynecologists to facilitate viewing the cervix,
whole new simultaneously exposes the neck of the womb and obscures the female
phallus. That is, until it is turned. The feminist turn of the technology for
truth of the viewing a woman’s sex generates a whole new truth of the female body,
a whole new female body, and a whole new discourse: the discourse of
female body. the posthysteric in which the question of “how to female ejaculate” is not
only spoken and written but also continues to be taught in workshops by
the very subjects who produced the discourse.6 Deborah Sundahl, Carol
6 Film: Fatale Video, Clips (1988); Kath Daymond, Nice Girls Don’t Do It (1989/90);
Fatale Video, How to Female Ejaculate (1992); Annie Sprinkle, Sluts and God-
desses Video Workshop (1992); House of Chicks (Dorrie Lane), The Magic of
Female Ejaculation (1992); Deborah Sundahl, with Carol Queen, Shannon Bell
and Baja, How to Female Ejaculate (1992); Deborah Sundahl, Tantric Journey
to Female Ejaculation: Unveiling the g-Spot and Female Ejaculation (1998),
Deborah Sundahl, Female Ejaculation For Couples and Deborah Sundahl (2004),
Deborah Sundahl, Female Ejaculation The Workshop (2009), Deborah Sundahl,
Female Ejaculation The Lecture (2012), Gilles Boyon and Segolene Hanotaux, g
Spotting: A Story of Pleasure and Promise documentary featuring workshop with
Shannon Bell (2011), showing in the International Documentary Film Festival
(idfa) November 2012.
Audio: cbc radio, Ideas, “One Sex or Two?” (1995).
Print: I have published articles and pictures in a number of porn magazines: Rites
(1989), Bad Attitudes (1992), Lickerish (1993); Cupido (1990), Spectator (1991);
Adam (1992); Over Forty (2000). I have written performative essays in popular
culture books: Kroker, The Hysterical Male; Bell, Whore Carnival; Bell in John-
son, ed., Jane Sexes It Up, and “The Female Phallus” in Fast Feminism. Deborah
Sundahl addressed a number of questions concerning female ejaculation in her
advice column “Ask Fanny,” which featured in On Our Backs throughout the
early to mid-1990s. She continues to address female ejaculation questions on
her website, isismedia.org. In 2003, Sundahl wrote Female Ejaculation and the

206 | Bell
Queen, and I continue to teach workshops, write texts, produce films and
documentary footage for television documentaries, and speak on female
ejaculation to potential female ejaculators; we have done so for almost
the past quarter century.

Something to see: The ejaculating female phallus

Lying down on the floor, my cunt elevated on a plush red pillow, I turned
the speculum sideways and slipped it inside. Tejal, the stunningly hand-
some boy/girl host, illuminated my erection with a flashlight as the twenty
or so Mumbai dykes, femmes, and transmen looked at what was once
nothing to see. Some slipped on a surgical glove and slid a couple of fingers
inside to stimulate my swelling hardness. The consensus was that although
everyone had previously felt the female phallus in full and partial fisting
activities, its visual magnitude had previously remained invisible.
The visibility of the internal erection repositions the top wall of the
vagina, specifically the spongy erectile tissue and the glands and ducts
surrounding the urethra, as a female phallus. It turns out that just as Dora
suspected and D’or knew the phantom female cock haunting psychoanaly-
sis is an actual cock, Freud’s little girls’ so-called hallucinations were actu-
ally body knowledge of the presence of a real penis, always already there,
awaiting the appropriate technology and action—a turned speculum—to
come into view (Bell, Fast Feminism 57–58). I produce an ejaculation shot
with the speculum inside to make the internal female sex organ visible
from the outside. This creates a physical and visual redesign of the female
body’s sexual anatomy.
Finally, I perform, with my body, a live reproduction of the artist Louise
Bourgeois’s erotic bronze sculpture, the headless form suspended mid-air
in pain and/or ecstasy, Arch of Hysteria (1993). In continuum with the erect
pubic mound of Bourgeois’s sculpture, I place female ejaculation. While
Bourgeois visually conflates the hysteric’s arc-de-cercle (Freud, “Fragment
of an Analysis” 98) and the arch of female orgasm, I provide the golden
spike that the posthysteric knows is at the root of the arc/arch: the ejacu-
lating female phallus.

g-Spot, the classic text on female ejaculation. It is a beautiful mesh of female

ejaculation knowledge combined with a practical approach to disseminating
the skills of female ejaculation, including excellent instructions both for the
ejaculator and her partners. It also has an extensive, up-to-the moment data-
base of research documenting practically everything ever produced on female
ejaculation. And, it is written by a woman who has over twenty years practical
experience teaching other women how to female ejaculate.

Fragment of a Case | 207
 While the posthysteric cannot be simply reduced to the ejaculating
female body, this body is an important icon of the discursive transfor-
mation wrought by the posthysteric. Although the hysteric, as recorded
by Freud, and the posthysteric have a similar physiological experience
in terms of the “analogous change in the corresponding female organ,”
the posthysteric knows how to induce this change—erection and female
ejaculation; that is, she possesses the technological know-how about “the
sexual workings of her jewel” that the hysteric was seeking.
The posthysteric breaks the circuit of the traditional four discourses
of mastery in psychoanalysis. She provides an answer to the key question
that Lacan puts in the mouth of the hysteric: “What is the feminine organ?”
And in so answering, “It is a female phallus,” with the agency and action
that organ potentiates, shifts the terrain from the jewel case of Oedipalized
heterosexual practice to the terrain of queer practice.
The question shifts to “What shoots and sprays, shoots and sprays,
shoots and sprays? Answer: A Woman” and introduces the defining
question of the posthysteric: “How to …?,” specifically “How to female
ejaculate?” It is the asking and answering of this question that marks the
postness of the hysteric. The posthysteric produces words and images
that show “the magnitude of what she as a woman is capable of revealing
concerning jouissance.”

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Gad Horowitz for his superb editorial and theoretical
skills, and I would like to thank Raan Matalon for the time he has given
to reading, discussing, and theorizing Lacan with me.

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———. “Kvinnerspruter de ogsa! —Hvordan ejakulere?” Cupido 4 (1990):
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208 | Bell
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