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)

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)

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.