The Haunted History of America: The current political disavowal of feminine weakness

Updated: January 27, 2025, 11:48 AM

Is the love-hate relationship with being feminine in American politics rooted in the destructive libidinal drives, torn asunder by the original oedipal arrangement? Let’s look at the 2016 presidential election and the 2024 presidential election in which two female Democrats ran against the Republican nominee Donald Trump. Any questions?

The fantasies of “lost” wholeness and the sexist-driven splitting and projection arising from the ashes of sexist-driven narcissistic wounding that leads us to seek a place, a fantasy space, where we might no longer be vulnerable to hurt, humiliation, and isolation associated with the loss. After losing the last four wars; Korean, Vietnam, Iraqi, and Afghanistan, which may very well describes the American political sentiment that inscribes fear of feminine weakness and inferiority in the psyche of Americans. “As the grandiosity of the U.S. identity has been increasingly tied to military strength, politicians live in fear of being labeled ‘weak’ (Harris and Botticelli, et. al., 2010, pg. 159).” I can only assume the last four wars have made male political and military leaders feel impotent. This makes apparent the American political denial of America’s weaknesses along with its prevalent anxieties. Violence is not power, but it’s opposite. The extraordinary American capability for violence has stimulated a grandiosity that confuses “Power” by the American people and their leaders with “Strength”, thereby, reinforcing the dichotomy of the “Superior - Inferior” paradigm. The belief in American omnipotence requires a disavowal, a denial, a failure to acknowledge our inability to control events. America no longer controls the identities of other countries. Other countries are moving to form alliances in something known as BRICS. BRICS Nations are characterized by their large populations, rapid economic growth, and increasing influence on the world stage. They offer an alternative bloc for emerging economies that may have struggled with international monetary funds structural adjustment and austerity programs. BRICS is an upcoming and growing combined GDP valued at $26.03 trillion dollars. BRICS maybe approaching a trend to outperform the G7’s GDP. The G7 was formed in 1975 as an informal association of seven democratic industrialized countries. The U.S. is part of the G7. The G7’s GDP, in 2023, was $45.9 trillion dollars (Adebisi, 2023).

In critiquing current American politics, the “Ex” of American political male patriarchy, that object other who incarnated feminine weakness with the rejection of the “little boy’s fantasies” (the oedipal mother), set in place a repetition drive and creates a fantasy space. In this fantasy space, “the little boy” would either be completely loved romantically by this “Ex” or rejected, turns toward the father becoming more like his paternal identifier where he would never feel the pain of inferior weakness and rejection again. This grandiosity in the American identity and the disavowal and denial of feminine weakness, is at the heart of American resistance to see clearly the Truth. The truth that dependency and interdependency does not amount to feminine weakness.

A major stake of discourse that reinforces sexual difference is the power to define who can lay claim to “Superior Wholeness” and “Strength” and who cannot. This argument and theory I am outlining runs parallel to, not just gender and sexual orientation, but race as well. Because in order for one to become upwardly mobile in the American middle-class, one is often required to reject part of who they are. Thus, analysis of psychological enactments describe how, while one can become wealthy and successful in their fields, they can never become fully “white”, “heterosexual”, “female”, “male”, or whatever other attributed is coveted and denied by the popular culture. This reinforces the inclusion of certain groups who are deemed “Superior” and what groups are deemed “Inferior”. If what is coveted (see the attributes listed above) then the subject’s mission might be doomed to psychic failure in a political system or culture that denies gender rights, sexual orientation rights, racial rights, etc. The denial of the American political male patriarchy towards “feminine weak inferiority”, with its denial of dependency and interdependency, is no different to the fantasies to deny one is male when one is female, nor any different when one denies one is black in the fantasy of becoming more “white middle-class and upwardly mobile.” What does it mean, then, to be the right kind of man in America political male patriarchy today? Does it mean a denial of dependency and interdependency with our neighboring countries? Does it draw its meaning and reason for being by imposing violent and aggressive physical opposition? Or is it a denial that America possesses absolutely no feminine weaknesses? These psychic states are bound to our haunted histories and we all suffer from them.

There is a pernicious way in which hate can cycle into more hate, thereby, transmitting the collapsed space of the third (see Benjamin, 2018) closing off the possibility of empathy and compassion for the other in what is called “malignant dissociative contagion” (Grand, 2000).

The Psychic Colonization of the Mind

If a female or male child is fashioned through a “colonization of the mind” rather than by “being mentalized” by the guardian or caregiver, then these children’s minds have someone else’s mind lodged inside their own. That is, another’s evacuated fears and traumatic history occupying their psychic spaces, and it is the Colonizer, not the colonized, who seeks to control and own the “Object-Other” (i.e. the colonized) from developing an independent and separate identity. “Mentalization is about making space, about creating room for thought and reflection, about thinking together in relationships (see Grand and Salberg, et. al., 2017). The space between the Colonizer and the colonized represents a collapse of mutuality. The space between the Colonizer and the colonized is about destroying the identity of the colonized and obliterating mutual exchange by injecting the unprocessed contents of the Colonizer’s mind which restricts the colonized from the freedom to think independently. The Colonizer uses the space to locate unbearable pieces of his own mind by imposing a self-denying, submissive, non-entitled, subordinate white femininity and the Colonizer gains leverage and control over the subject’s mind who has been usurped by the Colonizer. This is, sadly, very easy to accomplish in young children.

If the colonized mind covets the elements of an “idealized other”, it’s not so much about the other in the subject’s desire of sexual fantasy or whatever the fantasy entails the possessing of the coveted attributes, but has more to do with what the “idealization of otherness” symbolically represents to the colonized subject and that which the colonized subject lacks or does not possess. It is as Lacan might have said in 1977 and 1998, that any idealized attributes to identity embodies a fantasy of wholeness (INVINCIBILITY and INVULNERABILITY) to which NO ONE can lay claim. It is an illusion and a lie and all lies seek collusion to carry out and sustain the fantasy. Because we all suffer the human condition, we are ALL vulnerable to death both psychic and biologic. We all suffer from psychic defenses that seek to protect our egos from destruction and these are often accomplished through fantasy.

In my own personal desire of an idealized other, I came to understand my lack of self protection, my lack of self-defense, my lack of strength and power against the violent and non-violent forces pressing upon me. It took the embodiment of a desire for “male police power” in the illusion that by having this fantasy, of this type of “wholeness”, which symbolically masquerades as an “invincible phallic invulnerability” to which NO ONE can lay claim, that would protect me from death and destruction. That is, the idealized and desired power of phallic privilege to which we all women and men wish to attain. This is my haunted history, a haunted identity, to which I have many differing fantasies. The idealized phallus of the symbolic space can take many forms in psychic fantasy; weight lifting and bodybuilding, muscular strength, the police officer with his gun (the phallic symbolic), lesbian homosexuality, the middle aged cosmetic surgical procedure that helps elude an aging femininity from psychic death as well as the symbolic use of the pen in writing our stories to empower ourselves and give power to our imagined powerlessness.

My pretense to incarnating a type of invincible phallic invulnerability was met with defeat in someone else’s encounter with me. Their haunted history with their haunted identity, forced usurpation by imposing a form of Colonization via wireless electromagnetic frequency assault torture. I was attempting to form an atypical, non-submissive, active, dominant white female identity when the wireless electromagnetic frequency assault torture tore me asunder to the position of self-denying, submissive, chaste, obedient, subordinate, interior space of the non-active, typical to the desires of a controlling middle-class white male. This is often desired by controlling white entitled men. In this exchange, the Colonizer leveraged the dominant hegemonic narrative to reinforce a power dynamic of control and ownership over my mind and body. My Colonizer’s wishes seemed to echo, “You are “a lesser object.” You must not delude yourself by indulging your own vanity to an imagined Superior Phallic Identity. Your aims are superficial and narcissistic and elude social progress and position.” This begs the question, “Who’s right is it to decide whether my desire for a fantasy that entertained phallic imagined strength of athleticism with the desire for androgynous self-dressed should be obliterated?”

Currently, my coerced pretense to entertain a large, white, female-otherness is precisely the normative unconscious process desired by my Colonizer that sustains sexual inequality and protects the Colonizer from his homophobic fears. It contains the echoes of a generational transmission of prohibition against “all things non-conforming to the heterosexual hegemony,” a collusion with the heterosexuality and the inequality inherent in the sexed paradigm of modern heterosexuality with “female inferiority” as the desired object of sexual desire and “masculine superiority” as the only valued identity. This Colonization by wireless electromagnetic frequency assault torture bolsters the phantasmagorical position of the dominant “superior phallus” (a technological creation of an electromagnetic phallic tether from perpetrator to victim — a FRANKENSTEIN) that speaks a wish to hold the fantasy that the Colonizer possess superior phallic strength, and it is the Colonizer that is invulnerable to pain and loss and weakness. The psychic defense does exactly what it was intended to do. It bolsters the Colonizer’s identity by staking claim to a superior - omnipotent phallic imaginary, and hold on an integrity that eludes psychic death, thereby, securing attachment to the Colonizer’s ancestral ghosts and haunted history by perpetuating the haunting by keeping his ancestral specter’s ideologies alive and well, remaining loyal to his ghosts and remaining securely attached (whole), safe and loved by his ancestral specters, free from rejection and any castrations that might have threatened his survival.

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