The P*ssy Missile Has Launched: Free Speech Effects of the Women’s March as Prelude to #MeToo, and With a Coda1

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay traces the unfolding of vaginal and vulvic expressive topography from the Women’s March, through the grassroots strikes on International Women’s Day, to #ShePersisted, and, most momentously, to the emergence of #MeToo and the eruptive feminine. At the same time, it traces the movement from semiotic confinement to the emergence of a space, a third, for the porous elemental feminine to resist, and to allure, by virtue of her inappropriable freedom. The vaginal symbolic is a quintessential marker of that postbinary, elusive, enigmatic “space between,” a borderspace that operates beyond patriarchy. As the unconscious is untamable, this space is beyond domestication. It is not accidental that the Trump era is characterized by a preoccupation with borders, immigrants, walls, reproductive surveillance, and a general fear of feminine space. #MeToo’s survival and revolutionary and emancipatory potential lie in its opening of this lawful vaginality, and in erecting a postpatriarchal phallic symbol.