A man can only pretend to be a woman; only a woman can pretend to be a man who pretends to be a woman, as only a woman can pretend to be what she is (a woman). To account for this specifically feminine status of pretending, Lacan refers to a woman who wears a concealed fake penis in order to evoke that she is phallus… …The man’s first reaction upon seeing the contours of the fake penis is: “Put this ridiculous fake off and show me what you’ve got beneath!” The man thereby misses how the fake penis is the real thing: the “phallus” that the woman is, is the shadow generated by the fake penis, i.e., the spectre of the non-existent ‘real’ phallus beneath the cover of the fake one. In this precise sense, the feminine masquerade has the structure of mimicry, since, for Lacan, in mimicry, I do not imitate the image I want to fit into, but those features of the image which seem to indicate that there is some hidden reality behind.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dSreV7