Professor Diane Davis of Old Dominion University in Rhetoric Review, Fall 1995:

The building frustration over this impasse for feminists has been evidenced lately in the promotion of Lorena Bobbitt to near demigod(dess) status. The rabid celebration of Bobbitt for having had the ovum(?) to bobbit(t)-off with a kitchen knife is symptomatic of an epidemic of feminist ressentiment that's as infectious as the flu. But it seems to me that what's worthy of celebration in the Bobbitt bobbing has nothing to do with the rape or the mutilation, with the repayment of a violation with a violation. What's worth celebrating here has nothing to do with revenge. The following is a slow-moed creative re/viewing of Lorena's story that lets the spotlight fall precisely on what our logocentric perceptions have no capacity to recognize. Recognition, in this instance, calls for the engagement of an/Other sensibility entirely. Lorena, this essay suggests, should indeed be celebrated—not because she cuts it off, not because she keeps it—but because she pitches it. And in pitching it, she dis/covers a way out of the binary system all together, and so a way out of phallocentrism. Let's zoom in on her dilemma.

[Ed.: Not only did Ms. Bobbitt cut off her husband's penis, she threw it out of a car window just past a "No Littering" sign.]

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