Reading the Feminine with Irigaray

Abstract

Luce Irigaray is a theorist whose work has been examined from many different perspectives in the last thirty years. Her work has both been scrutinized by feminists sympathetic to her writings and by those who are more hostile to her engagement with philosophy and psychoanalysis. There is a panoply of views around her work that defies attempts to categorize them. There are three key positions that are commonly held in relation to Irigaray’s work. Certain feminists have challenged Irigaray’s work as (biologically) essentialist. Critics such as Moi (1985), Plaza (1978), Sayers (1982) and Segal (1987) argue that Irigaray’s work is based on a notion of feminine specificity that is somehow grounded in the psychic or material female body. There are, of course, many shortcomings in this approach to Irigaray’s work, perhaps the most important of which is that such analyses miss the very point of Irigaray’s engagement with the monolithic and monological texts of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Important responses to this criticism of Irigaray are made by Fuss (1989), Whitford (1991), Braidotti (2002), Deutscher (2002) and Stone (2006). The critique of essentialism in Irigaray’s work does not take account of the very radical attempts made throughout her work to posit a critique of patriarchy that makes possible a mode of change that has ramifications for notions of gendered subjectivity. In claiming that Irigaray’s work is ahistorical and non-materialist, such accounts reveal the extent to which Irigaray’s work has been dismissed on the basis of misreadings of her earliest texts. As Schor has pointed out, Irigaray is not interested in defining ‘woman’, but is, rather, committed to theorizing feminine specificity in terms that give due consideration to questions of sexual difference (Burke, Schor and whitford, 1994: 66).