Tit Variations (for Claire Pentecost)

by Lauren Berlant

1. Sketched on your wall, “Three women wearing the same pair of breasts” does time like a caveman artist relic. The various faces above the breasts bear yet withhold their statements.

2. Nakedness never fails to shock: the bared chest prompts a snap reaction and a quick shift up to the face clogs hearing.

3. Breasts, in short, compete with the face, with its demand for recognition. Nipples look back without seeing. They refuse love’s demand for a shot’s reverse shot; they judge with a cat’s flat Jack Benny eyes.  Deadpan smacks the gaze like desire does, or like bad news.

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The medical-industrial complex jabs and ducks about how best to monitor tits. What’s a little surplus diagnosis? The x-ray kills and heals, like love. Shouldn’t a mammogram be a letter? Dear Tits, This year you may have dodged the bullet, so this time you shall feel only the blank’s dull thud (which can still kill you, like the x-ray, or love). I love myself a good mammogram: I love the Platonic male snap they stick on your nipples. I wear mine until they fall off, hoping that my female snaps will appear the way they would for the happiest robot.

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What’s up with the hideous hair on the wall? Why distance abjection’s disjecta membra from the frank faces propped above the brace of breasts? Are you trying to separate the singular female from unconscious projection–about MOMMY, or the prospect of touching the uncanny of such very soft skin? Or from the public hair that marks the unseen thing, the so-called vertical lasagna? Or are you trying to make the breasts iconic like the erect cock, the gift that in fantasy keeps on giving? Are you making a scaffold for a better world of language and the law? Questions, questions.

(Claire Pentecost, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, Gayatri C. Spivak, Jasbir Puar, Dan Savage)

Piece crossposted with Supervalent Thought