Feminism could be described as a discourse that negotiates corporeality, what a body is and what a body can do. Nevertheless, the specter of essentialism means that the biological or anatomical body, the body that is commonly understood to be the "real" body, is often excluded from this investigation. The increasingly sterile debate between essentialism and antiessentialism has inadvertently encouraged this somatophobia. I argue that these opposing positions are actually inseparable, sharing a complicitous relationship that produces material effects.

Drawing on the work of Irigaray and Levinas, this paper discusses the ethical limitations of Lacan's "mirror-stage" dynamic and interpolates a different interpretation of the material he uses to elaborate his theory. Close attention is paid to the significance of metaphors of vision and touch in the work of the three philosophers. The paper develops into an analysis of Irigaray's and Levinas's interpretations of touch as the differential site of ethics.

In this dissertation I argue that reason is nothing more than the term we give to thinking taken to be legitimate. It has no a priori content. Because of this, there is no objective thing called reason which could be accepted or rejected. I argue that Nietzsche's most important contribution to the critique of the Enlightenment is his exposing of reason as a socially constructed discourse of desire. This puts him above the fray of the debates over the acceptance or (...) rejection of reason, and onto what I claim is the more productive terrain of looking at reason as problematic but unavoidable. Irigaray develops this Nietzschian approach to reason in a way that exposes the tendencies of philosophical notions of reason to prevent women from being able to articulate their interests in discourses taken to be legitimate. Through this example of the marginalization of the interests of women, she is also able to help us see just how it is that reason can operate hegemonically. This epistemological perspective lends a certain plausability to Habermas' claim that in the absence of a transcendental ground for a notion of rationality, what we should call rational is a judgment that all participants in a discussion agree is correct. Where Habermas' position becomes problematic is in his insistence that a rational consensus can be distinguished philosophically from a non rational one. It is here that Habermas' position operates to reinforce dominant exclusionary mechanisms. I draw out the implications of this position for looking at feminist in an international context, and argue that we do not need universal notions of what counts as women's liberation to be able to make cross-cultural critical judgments. Rather, what we need to be able to do this is an open ear to the self articulation of the concerns of real women. I argue that critique can be rational if we do not suppose that we can ever have a fixed notion of what counts as rational, but rather if we accept that rationality is a place holder concept for the discourses which we take to be legitimate. From this it follows that the rational is the site of inevitable struggles over legitimation. (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)