Dildonics, dykes and the detachable masculine

J. Hamming

By exploring various cultural implications of the dildo in relation to representations of lesbian sexuality, this article seeks to examine the influences of psychoanalysis on our cultural understanding of _dildonics_. This examination, moreover, seeks to reread the dildo through the lens of an alternative interpretive model that relies on Donna Haraway_s _Informatics of Domination_, or _the translation of the world into a problem of coding_. By shifting our attention to information theory, which emphasizes pattern and randomness over absence and presence, this article shows how the dildo operates as a technological extension which mutates (rather than castrates) its lesbian user and rearticulates dildonics in post-gender terms. Such a transformation is capable of disrupting any sense that the dildo operates as a simulacral penis or as indicative of a lesbian_s repressed desire for a male lover.