In my last posting, I concentrated on the figure of Adam Susan and how his relationship to the fate computer reveals something about the libidinal investment that sustains the alienating automaton of law. Now I'd like to shift attention to the role of women as it pertains to the 'legal' and the 'lewd'.
In the first scene at the Kitty-Kat Keller nightclub, a hang-out for both government officials and local criminals, a singer enters on to the stage and begin to sing a song that connects the law directly to sexual desire. Here's an excerpt:
'I'm not politically ticklish and theory makes me weary... and affairs of state aren't my kind of affairs. And I'd never bed, nor much less wed the wag whose flag is deepest red. My tastes run more to
The song, much the way V does in his own performances, brings forward a dimension of enjoyment relegated to the background of the enforcement of law. The 'point at which the legal meets the lewd' marks where the written rules encounter their libidinal support. Nowhere is this point better revealed than in the abuse of women underwritten by the privileged position of men within the legal order.
In the above example, the performance of femininity is intrinsically bound to the tropes of fascist spectacle, a reading supported by the performer's Nazi-style walk across the stage as she describes her erotic fascination with lads whose 'cute salute is manly and erect'. In order to please her audience, the performer must present her desire in a way that flatters the patrons, who represent the legal and extra-legal elite of the state. These 'unwritten rules' regulate the desire of women in this society.
The sub-plot of Rosemary Almond best epitomizes the importance of these unwritten rules. When her husband is killed by V, she is left without state support and without experience cannot find for herself a well-paying job. Desperate, she is driven to date a man she despises (Roger Dascombe) and to dance in a burlesque show in order to support herself. In both cases she must submit herself to male desire in order to survive a rule of law that affords her no other legal or economic protection. She is both physically and metaphorically exposed to the excesses of law, at the mercy of male desire (see 205).
One possible parallel comes in V's torture of Evey Hammond. It is not difficult to see the structure of sado-masochistic reversal in how V stages the very scenario of his incarceration, except he has changed from the object of violence into the subject who inflicts it. Of course as Freud teaches us, this perversion includes three positions in so far as in punishing Evey, V also punishes himself through her.
Nevertheless, V's first defense of his actions is to say he does it out of 'love' for her. I have argued elsewhere that V's torture of Evey reflects the necessity of a revolutionary facing his or her own abjection within the law. So, here I'd like to offer the variation that the torture also stages V's fantasy of sado-masochistic violence against women. Yet, in so far as I have also argued that V holds up a 'fun-house mirror' to the state, this violence might be read as a version of extra-legal state punishment. V's static expression, once again, makes his actual investment in this procedure ambiguous. But his perpetual smile also betrays the hidden truth of libidinal investment in the enforcement of the law.
What is the status of women within/without the law in our other texts?
From Watchmen, Silk Spectre (Sally Jupiter), one of the original Minutemen, is interesting in relation to your question about the status of women in the law. While she was an ass-kicking crimefighter, she was also sexualized as a cultural icon, and as she looks back on the past she is reconciled to it. Showing her daughter Laurie a lewd memento from her days of costumed crimefighting, she explains "It's a Tijuana Bible ... A little eight-page porno comic they did in the '30s and '40s... They did 'em about newspaper funnies characters like Blondie, even real people like Mae West. This one's about me." Laurie, showing her progressive politics, is critical of this representation of her mother: "Oh God! Mother, this is just gross! Somebody sent you this?" "Sure," replies Sally, "Listen those things are valuable. Like antiques. Eighty bucks an' up. I think its kinda flattering." "Flattering...?" "Being reminded that people used to slobber over me? Sure. Flattering. Why not? Laurie, I'm 65. Every day the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the Grimy parts of it... well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time." This nostalgia, an optimization of the past on which the reader attains a privileged position of observation, is a recurring motif that creates a moral quandary around Sally Jupiter. As it is revealed that she was raped by the Comedian, the only thing more traumatic is her eventual forgiveness and memorializing of him as a gentle lover who happened to father Laurie. We should see the connection here with the perfume called "Nostalgia" which Viedt purposely markets to exploit this tendency to optimize our "modified visions of a half-imagined past." Watchmen gazes directly at the frank sexualization of women in the superhero genre, while introducing us to subjects who are entirely imbricated in the ideology such that they can hardly critique it.
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