By reading the analyses of mysticism found in Beauvoir and Irigaray with and against some medieval women's mystical texts, the paper articulates a possible space for the divine within feminist thought.

This paper explores the symbolic implications of Luce Irigaray's images of the female body, particularly the two lips and the mucous. It suggests that Irigaray's work reveals some of the problems attendant on "positive images of women.".

In this essay I distinguish four different modes of feminist critique of reason. Discussing the work of authors such as Keller, Irigaray, and Butler, I point out that the issue of masculine connotations has been addressed with regard to different concepts-or at least different aspects-of reason. In view of a tendency to overdraw the objections, I suggest to reformulate the feminist critique of reason. I also argue that a rediscovery of those philosophical concepts of reason that do not restrict this (...) term to instrumental rationality might be useful for this purpose. (shrink)

2013 marks 10 years since the Sexual Offences Act 2003 was passed. That Act made significant changes to the law of rape which appear now to have made very little difference to reporting, prosecution or conviction rates. This article argues that the Act has failed against its own measures because it remains enmeshed within a conceptual framework of sexual indifference in which woman continues to be constructed as man’s other. This construction both constricts the frame in which women’s sexuality can (...) be thought and distorts the harm of rape for women. It also continues woman’s historic alienation from her own nature and denies her entitlement to a becoming in line with her own sexuate identity. Using Luce Irigaray’s critical and constructive frameworks, the article seeks to imagine how law might ‘cognise’ sexual difference and thus take the preliminary steps to a juridical environment in which women can more adequately understand and articulate the harm of rape. (shrink)

This article examines some recent theoretical objects of feminism with a view towards a reinvigorated dialogue with psychoanalysis. Against the backdrop of debates on essentialism, universalism, social constructionism and historical change, it aims to reintroduce the value of psychoanalytic ideas to feminism by unfolding a dimension of history in the divided subject and adding a positive value to psychoanalytic universalism. This argument is carried out with the help of the writings of Julia Kristeva, from the early essay, `Women's Time', to (...) the psychoanalytic publications of the 1980s and 1990s. (shrink)

Horizons of Difference offers twelve original essays inspired by Luce Irigaray's complex, nuanced critique of Western philosophy, culture, and metaphysics, and her call to rethink our relationship to ourselves and the world through sexuate difference. Contributors engage urgent topics in a range of fields, including trans feminist theory, feminist legal theory, film studies, critical race theory, social-political theory, philosophy of religion, environmental ethics, philosophical aesthetics, and critical pedagogy. In so doing, they aim to push the scope of Irigaray's work beyond (...) its horizon. Horizons of Difference seeks conversations that Irigaray herself has yet to fully consider and explores areas that stretch the limits of the notion of sexuate difference itself. Sexuate difference is a unifying mode of thought, bringing disparate disciplines and groups together. Yet it also resists unification in demanding that we continually rethink the basic coordinates of space, place, and identity. Ultimately, Horizons of Difference insists that the fragmented, wounded subjectivities within the dominant regime of masculine sameness can inform how we negotiate space, find place, and transform identity. (shrink)

This paper concerns a theoretical struggle to situate childless women within contemporary feminist debates about gender, the body and sexuality. Although psychoanalytic theory offers a compelling approach to the body, a Freudian account of childless women has largely escaped investigation. This paper will provide such an analysis, arguing that competing interpretations of psychoanalytic theory reveal a salient tension in the interpretation of gender identification. On the one hand, some theorists focus on a social development model of gender identification. This model (...) emphasizes the sexual aim of reproduction as a salient feature of ‘normal’ gender identity development. In this paper, I argue this approach may pathologize childless women insofar as they ‘fail’ to socially develop in ways that conform to the imperative to sexually reproduce. On the other hand, a number of theorists argue against the foreclosure on gender identity that the social development model implies. An alternate interpretation of psychoanalytic theory calls attention to Freud's theory of ‘psychic bisexuality’ or ‘polymorphous perversity’. This notion invites a much more complex and ambivalent notion of gender identity as it emphasizes the temporal, fragile and incomplete process of gender identification. I aim to argue that this latter interpretation offers a space for childless women as it attempts to lay bare the hegemonic relationship between femininity and sexual reproduction. I draw upon the work of a number of feminist theorists who variously take up these central themes in Freudian psychoanalytic theory to further contest the reification of the association between femininity and maternity. (shrink)

This article takes as its point of departure Luce Irigaray'sElemental Passions, in which a woman‐speaker tries to make her lover and the discipline of philosophy understand that she is not how they have imagined her to be; that she is not at all but that she keeps becoming through perpetual movement. The article investigates Irigaray's investment in a form of materialist difference feminism that offers conceptual links to the posthumanist work of Karen Barad's agential realism, especially her theorization of intra‐action. (...) The link between Irigaray and Barad is established via a diffractive reading that incorporates the dance/movement research practice of Contact Improvisation. Although expressed through written language,Elemental Passionscreates the impression of the woman‐speaker dancing, of encountering herself, her environment, and her lover through moved and moving contact, searching for a practice of moving‐together, feeling‐with, and feeling‐between that can be experienced in an improvised dance duet. Exploring how touch and the sharing of weight in Contact Improvisation challenges boundaries and establishes ever‐changing configurations and entanglements between dancers, the article proposes that Irigaray's woman‐speaker envisions herself as a posthuman/ist woman and that improvised dancing offers a practice of intra‐action through which she can encounter the world in her becoming. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's fearlessness towards speaking the body has earned for her work the dismissive label “essentialist.” But Irigaray's Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un suggest that essence may not be the unitary, monolithic, in short, essentialist category that anti-essentialists so often presume it to be. Irigaray strategically deploys essentialism for at least two reasons: first, to reverse and to displace Jacques Lacan's phallomorphism; and second, to expose the contradiction at the heart of Aristotelian metaphysics (...) which denies women access to “Essence” while at the same time positing the essence of “Woman” precisely as non-essential. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's argument that women need a feminine divine is placed in the context of her analyses of the interconnection between man's appropriation of woman as his “negative alter ego” and his identification with the impossible ego ideal represented by the figure of God. As an alternative, the “feminine divine” is conceived as a realm with which women would be continuous. It would allow mediation between humans, and interrupt cannibalizing appropriations of the other.

This article investigates Frenchfeminist philosopher, Luce Irigaray, with aview to discussing how a critique ofocularcentrism is a focus in articulating herproject of sexual difference. It will discusshow an ocularcentric tradition intersects withissues of sexual difference and language, andhow these together enact relations of powerthat erase the feminine from view. Irigaray'stextual strategies are explored as possessingthe potential to engender a new femininesubjectivity. This article is divided into foursections. In the first section, the privilegingof the visual in western philosophical thoughtis discussed, with (...) particular reference tolanguage. In the following section, Irigaray'sintellectual project will be introduced, payingparticular attention to her use of language andthe role of vision. In the light of thesediscussions, Irigaray's re-reading of Plato'smyth of the cavern will then be subjected toclose examination and critique, to demonstratehow an ocularcentric tradition operates indiscourse. Finally the article will conclude bysuggesting an analysis of Irigaray's work interms of how language, vision, light, sexualdifference operate as relations of power isessential in the creation of a new femininesubjectivity. (shrink)