When I was six years old, my mother began filling me with horror stories to snap me out of my girlhood: If you don’t stop acting like a girl and start being a boy, then we’ll have to take you to the hospital and get your pee-pee cut off so that you can become a girl. I was appropriately terrorized by this threat: what six-year-old isn’t scared of hospitals, knife blades, operations–especially on the tender private flesh between the legs? Apparently, my mother understood the cultural uses of castration. In “Medusa’s Head,” Freud suggests that a “terror of castration” occurs “when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother.”1 The mother-Medusa barges into the boy’s psyche and provides evidence of the castration threat posed by the father. Invoking the myth of Medusa, Freud then articulates how the threat and terror of castration are used to create a heterosexualized male subject: just as Medusa’s victims turn to stone, the boy finds his penis hardened at the sight of the female nude. Thus castration is invoked in order to be debunked as fiction: the frightening Medusa, with her hair of snakes, is really “a mitigation of the horror, for [the snakes] replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of horror” (273). In effect, this mitigation is one that replaces the potentially lopped-off penis.
