labia

labia Although the term ‘labia’ can refer to the fleshy, liplike edges of any organ or tissue, it more specifically describes the outer (labia majora) and inner (labia minora) folds of the vulva. Woman's genital lips are now the focus of a new symbolics articulated by French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, who seeks to re-metaphorize the female body and free women from negative conceptions of their sexuality. It is through the labia that Irigaray theorizes woman's autoeroticism and sexual pleasure in a way significantly different from Freud and his French interpreter Lacan. In their psychoanalytic accounts, woman's sexuality is marked by her lack of a penis and by her position as passive object of desire. In contrast to psychoanalytic theories that imagine and valorize the male genitals as closed, singular, and whole, Irigaray revalues the openness that allows the woman's two lips to be separate, but also in constant contact. She argues for a vision of female pleasure that is multiple and mutual, tactile more than visual. Speaking of woman's autoeroticism, Irigaray writes that woman touches herself in and of herself, without any need for mediation. In her pleasure woman is both active and passive, both the one touching and the one being touched. Mastery of one by the other is not necessary to this feminist vision of female sexuality.

The two lips become for Irigaray the basis for theorizing a parler femme, a speaking as a woman. Contact again becomes a key idea, as parler femme relies on the contiguity of language, the closeness of words in their signification and sound. Such contiguity produces a speech in which one element slips into another, and Irigaray conceptualizes a feminine syntax that does not reduce the meaning of words and language to a single truth. As in her conception of female sexuality, doubling and multiplying are associated with the feminine. To speak as a woman is not to invent a new language, but to exploit the possibilities within existing systems and to disrupt the hierarchical logic of either/or propositions.

In associating woman's two sets of lips, Irigaray reworks an idea present in the Western tradition since the Greeks. Comparing the lips to the labia was common in Hippocratic medicine, which perceived the upper and lower portions of the female body as symmetrical and used the same term, stoma or mouth, to describe them. The mouth from which speech flowed corresponded to that of the uterus. Both were lined with lips that opened and closed. But this synonymy between the female lips was used to woman's disadvantage in antiquity. From Plato to Plutarch, the female mouth, like the female genitals, required strict legislation. A woman who conversed with men other than her husband was suspected of loose morals and potential infidelity. Hence the garrulousness of the mouth pointed to an improper activity of the nether lips.

The association between the two lips continued through the Middle Ages, exploited especially in the French fabliaux, verses of comic and/or moralizing content performed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As E. Jane Burns has pointed out in analyzing the fabliaux, their invocation of a ‘vaginalized mouth’ derives from the similarity between the lips of the mouth and the genital labia. In Le Fabliau du moigne, a monk searching for the ideal ‘cunt’ rejects one whose lips are too thin and whose form is not sufficiently mouthlike. And in Du Chevalier qui fist les cons parler a young knight about to be seduced asks that the maiden reveal her motive by speaking through her labia, rather than through her potentially deceitful lips. The idea of the talking vagina was not lost to the French tradition, and Diderot calls it up in Les Bijoux indiscrèt (1748). The plot centres on a magic ring that makes women reveal their sexual exploits not with their lying lips, but through their most honest and experienced parts — their genitals.

Irigaray's invocation of the labia, therefore, erodes from within a tradition that stresses woman's susceptibility to loose talk and sex. As well as challenging psychoanalysis, Irigaray's stress on woman's difference counters anatomical texts that present the female body as an inferior version of the male. Thomas Laqueur provides a history of such reasoning in his Making sex, and cites Gaspard Bauhin (1560–1624), professor of anatomy in Basel, who argued that the tendency to see all genital organs with reference to man was deeply embedded in language. Bauhin cited among the words for labia the Greek mutocheila, meaning snout, or more explicitly, penile lips. It was common, moreover, for anatomical texts to liken the labia to the foreskin; examples include writings by Mondino de Luzzi (1275–1326), Jacapo Berengario da Carpi (1522), and Josef Hyrtl (1880).

Most recently, The Complete Dictionary of Sexology (1995) records that ‘The labia majora are homologous to the male scrotum.’

If one tradition views the labia as homologous to male parts, another uses them to distinguish women of different racial types. Eighteenth-century travellers to southern Africa, such as François Le Vaillant and John Barrow, described what became known as the ‘Hottentot apron’, a hypertrophy of the labia minora caused by manipulating the genitalia. European scientists believed the Hottentot apron to be an innate characteristic of the black female body, and as such it fascinated medical professionals and laymen. Carl Linnaeus mistakenly supposed it was characteristic of all African women, and like other naturalists believed it a vestige of the Hottentot's animal origin. More sympathetic observers like Peter Kolb suggested that as a natural fig leaf it modestly concealed the female genitals. Still others compared it to female artifice and believed it formed through manual manipulation. Writers commonly linked it to the overdevelopment of the clitoris, and to the notion, common since the eighteenth century, that such overdevelopment led to lesbian love, or ‘tribadism’ to use the earlier term. Perversion thus became attached to the African genitals in a scientific account that reinforced stereotypes of the over-sexed, promiscuous black woman.

Mary D. Sheriff

Bibliography

Irigaray, L. (1991). This sex which is not one, trans. Catherine Porter. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.
Schiebinger, L. (1992). Nature's body. Gender in the making of modern science. Beacon Press, Boston.

See also genitalia; Hottentot apron; scrotum; vulva.