Using two contemporary cases of the global #MeToo movement and UK-based collective Sisters Uncut, this paper argues that a more in-depth and critical concern with gendered difference is necessary for understanding radical democratic ethics, one that advances and develops current understandings of business ethics. It draws on practices of social activism and dissent through the context of Irigaray’s later writing on democratic politics and Ziarek’s analysis of dissensus and democracy that proceeds from an emphasis on alterity as the capacity to (...) transform nonappropriative self-other relations. Therefore, the aims of the paper are: to develop a deeper understanding of a culture of difference and to consider sexual difference as central to the development of a practical democratic ethics and politics of organizations; to explore two key cases of contemporary feminist social movements that demonstrate connected yet contrasting examples of how feminist politics develops through an appreciation of embodied, intercorporeal differences; and to extend insights from Irigaray and Ziarek to examine ways in which a practical democratic politics proceeding from an embodied ethics of difference forms an important advancement to theorising the connection between ethics, dissent and democracy. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray classically challenges what she takes to be the masculine foundations of knowledge in Western liberal culture. The present article contends not only that this epistemological challenge implicates a radical feminist politics, but that it is also more helpful in formulating a multicultural feminist theory than is often acknowledged by her readers. This is because her account responds to the false neutrality of liberal feminist approaches to multiculturalism. It does so by supporting, at the socio-political level, transformative genealogical practices (...) that are aimed at fostering women's agency in culturally sensitive ways. However, Irigaray's recent work on multiculturalism does not sustain the necessary continuity between her core epistemological critique and her political claims. In particular, the continuity between her criticism of the West's sexual indifference and the cultural multiplicity of female identity becomes problematic in her recent work. The author finally contends that Irigaray's writings pose difficulties for a multicultural feminism, because they fail to specify the different forms of policy necessary to promote diverse women's equality in the postcolonial contexts on which she recently focuses. (shrink)

Some feminist commentators ignore Luce Irigaray’s contributions to rethinking classical and neoclassical theories of the market when their aims and hers are often largely of a piece. Other feminist commentators celebrate Irigaray’s writings by privileging a certain conception of the gift her philosophy is said to evoke because it challenges the logic of the market economy and its masculinist biases. Instead of viewing the market and the gift in a binary way, I argue that Irigaray examines the conditions of possibility (...) for transvaluing value and exchange as such. By way of an internal critique of economic texts and discourses, Irigaray draws out the available conceptual resources for the possibility of a model of exchange between two positively valued – sexuate – subjects. In this article I focus on the texts where Irigaray explicitly engages with key components of political economy – ‘Commodities among Themselves’, ‘Women on the Market’ and ‘Women, the Sacred and Money’ – and also her conceptualisation of a nonmarket economy in Elemental Passions. These brilliant and complex essays yield an understanding of the forms and the flows (value and exchange) of all economies (whether symbolic, linguistic, cultural or political) necessary for cultivating a sexuate economy. (shrink)

This article examines the limitations associated with Irigaray’s concept of a culture of difference. I suggest that her concept of sexual difference depends upon a conservative fiction of sameness. I argue that a fiction of phallic sameness underpins her evangelical championing of difference, and that such a fiction retains a conservative blindness to the complexities of contemporary social relations and erases the positive effects oppositional discourses have had on the culture of modernity. I question the debt Irigaray disavows to other (...) non-difference feminism, her insistence that woman are radically marginalized and suggest that her culture of difference is prescriptive and normative. Egalitarian feminism, understood as a postmodern project, is far more strategic, insofar as it offers a multiply-situated analysis of the relationship between women and power within modernity. I replace Irigaray’s negative image of the egalitarian feminist as an unnatural woman with the figure of the cyborg who embraces ontological impurity and strategically works within culture. (shrink)