“[The] word [niederkommen, give birth] indicates, metonymically, the final term, the term of suicide, in which is expressed what is at stake in the young homosexual woman, this being the sole mainspring of her entire perversion……namely, a steady and particularly reinforced love for the father,” (my emphasis) Lacan remarks at the end of the eighth chapter of his fourth seminar, implying an interesting link between perversion and feminine love for the father. But he never ventured to explain this tie further. While his Seminars 4 and 5 primarily delineate a theory of the phallus, they also articulate a theory of perversion. For Lacan, perversion can be best approached through female sexuality—more specifically female homosexuality—for it is located precisely outside the phallus.

Via a close examination of Lacan’s re-reading of Freud’s case histories of the young homosexual woman and Dora, this talk discusses the way in which perversion is considered “a feminine mode of love,” elucidating the relation between feminine phantasy and the phallus. This investigation consequently leads us to think about a new mode of jouissance, namely, “perverse jouissance” veiled in the hysteric’s fundamental question, “what is (to be) woman (la femme).”