The return of La/can!

This week Lacan's sardine can surfaces in Using Theory for a second time. (The image is from here.) We first encountered the sardine can back in April, 2007, when we read Lacan's "Of the Gaze as Objet petit a." Now, in February 2008, we encounter it again in Peggy Phelan's Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. For Phelan, Lacan's allegory of the sardine can helps to reveal the gaps in what she calls the "psychic and aesthetic economy of the Western gaze" through which a "psychic resistance" can be asserted. This "psychic resistance" may, in turn, lead to progressive political change. The not-so-straightforward understanding of the gaze in Lacanian psychoanalysis provides the basis for a hermeneutics of visibility and representation that Phelan identifies as an alternative to the conventional tactics of identity politics. An identity politics that tries to counteract male/Western hegemony by making female/non-Western others more visible through mimetic representation, Phelan reasons, actually just creates an opening for conservatives to further limit the power of the under-represented. (Some of you may remember Bruce Robbins's talk at the twentieth-century colloquium last year. Robbins offered a similar critique of Naomi Klein's No Logo, though from a totally different theoretical viewpoint.) Phelan recasts invisibility as a powerful position that exists outside of and also deconstructs the Western gaze and the exclusive and hegemonic social unity (celebrated by "the Right" and critiqued by the multiculturalist "Left") that is imposed on the world by the Western gaze. (Others may remember Heather Love's talk a couple weeks ago. Phelan's idea of the invisible/"unmarked" might be understood as a domain of being that exists outside the purview of modern social stigma and, by existing outside that purview, erodes the statistically-generated categories that organize populations into normal and marginal groups.)

I'm sympathetic with Phelan's political objectives in this project, and I find her claim that the "unmarked" can be a powerful position convincing and useful; but her mobilization of Lacan to theorize visibility/invisibility gives me pause. Phelan presents the "unmarked" as a domain where new modes of social relation and new conceptualizations of the real of generic become possible. It seems to me, however, that her use of Lacan introduces into the liberated, limitless space of the invisible some constraining and limiting presuppositions: an essentialized understanding of gender difference (see, for example, her discussion of "the theatre of drag" on p. 17: "A man imitates an image of a woman in order to confirm that she belongs to him."); a heteronormative understanding of sexuality (see, again, the discussion of "the theatre of drag" on p. 17); and an extremely limited model for subject formation. So this is what I want to know: Is it possible to use Phelan's provocative and valuable theory of the "unmarked" without also bringing on board the normative presuppositions that are operative in the Lacanian toolkit that she uses to develop that theory? Or: Could Phelan have disavowed or accounted for those normative presuppositions while still using Lacan to develop her theory?