I have not (yet) written on Lacan, who has been a catalyst for much social and sociological thought. Luce Irigaray studied with Lacan before developing her own influential feminist standpoint. I shall as ever in these ‘taster blogs’ have to abbreviate my exposition.
The feminine, Irigaray maintained, cannot be captured, represented or symbolised adequately under patriarchy. This is because femininity is the repressed structure that provides the infrastructural support and warranty for, phallocentric social relations. The feminine, she insists, must be permanently expunged – Bhaskar would say ‘absented’ – from language and the symbolic order.
She writes of the process of specularization. The feminine is but a mirror image of the masculine. Women, Irigaray contends, reflect back to men particular phallocentric ideals and norms regarding masculinity, and by means of this process the feminine is lost, given over and made available to the masculine. Elliott writes:
‘from maternal devotion to sexual masquerade, the seductive presence of the feminine frames the illusions of masculine desire.’
Drawing on psychoanalytic foundations, Irigaray refers to the (pre-Oedipal) mother-daughter relationship as external to, or exiled from, the symbolic order. This is a form of ‘dereliction’. Elliott quotes her as follows:
‘there is no possibility whatsoever, within the current logic of socio-cultural operations, for a daughter to situate herself with respect to her mother: because, strictly speaking, they make neither one nor two, neither has a name, meaning, sex of her own, neither can be ‘identified with respect to the other’.’
Drawing on Marxism and the structuralism of Levi-Strauss to compliment her psychoanalytic orientation, Irigaray ask how the commodification women occurs in society. Culture, she argues, is based on the exchange of women. She cites Levi-Strauss’ contention that women are scarce (commodities) in spite of their numbers because of men’s polygamous tendencies and the fact that not all women are judged equally desirable (that is, possess what Hakim calls ‘erotic capital’). Why are not men exchanged by women on the same criteria? This is because all ‘productive work’ that is ‘recognised, valued and rewarded’ in a patriarchal society is seen as men’s business, including the production and exchange of women. Men are an endogenous group, each remaining within his own family, tribe or clan and forming alliances through the exchange of women, who as exogenous others are foreign to the social order: they cannot participate in these exchanges, but instead are exchanged. Thus women have exchange value applied to them because they are a product of man’s labour.
Within a patriarchal society comprised of phallocentric social relations three roles are available: mother, virgin and prostitute. Irigaray defines male sexuality as the desire to appropriate nature and make it (re)produce. The mother, representative of productive nature, is subject to the control of the father, ‘marked’ with his name, confined to his house and excluded from exchange among men. By contrast, the virgin is ‘pure exchange value’, though once defloration occurs she enters into the realm of the mother is and is associated with the natural. She is in other words converted to ‘pure use value’. The prostitute possesses both exchange and use value: it is her use that is exchanged, rendering her an appropriate object of exchange among men. Across all three of these roles, Irigaray is at pains to point out, women are the objects of men’s pleasure and have no right to their own.
Irigaray is critical of any liberal politics of inclusion which espouses the goal of ‘equality’ between the sexes on the basis of her exposure of phallocentrism. After all, there is no neutral ‘equal’ citizen, this being a fiction that obscures the masculine as universal and justifies the continued denial of women’s unique sexual difference. If women are to become equal, then it is necessary to think equality not of sameness but of difference.
Not everyone – most especially in Anglo-Saxon cultures – is sympathetic to, let alone convinced by, Freud via either Lacan or Irigaray, but it is worth recalling here that prior to and even beyond WW2 women in medical textbooks and practice (and in many other fields) were seen as and reduced to male appendages. For example, there existed no scientific or culturally authoritative acknowledgement of women’s capacity for or right to sexual pleasure: indeed, it was assumed that they were required to be in close vicinity, ‘intimate’, solely to facilitate optimal male orgasmic fulfillment.
For Irigaray, however, recognition of women as ‘outside’, as ‘other’, also carries a potential for subversive activity. Like Cixous and others, she grounds this in women’s experiences of the body and sexuality. Women, she argues, need to expose, counter and replace the ‘constricted and constricting sexed identities of patriarchy’. Identities must be renegotiated. In her An Ethics of Sexual Difference and To Be Two, she emphasises the ‘ethical’ importance of highlighting the otherness of the other sex.
Elliott notes that Irigaray has been criticised for biological essentialism, that is, for the apparent presumption that there exists a transhistorical and transcultural female body and sexuality that (always) allows for and ‘promotes’ subversive activity. Elliott cites Juliet Mitchell here:
‘you cannot choose the imaginary, the semiotic, the carnival as an alternative to the symbolic, as an alternative to the law. It is set up by the law precisely as its own lurid space, its own area of imaginary alternative, but not as a symbolic alternative. So that politically speaking, it is only the symbolic, a new symbolism, a new law, that can challenge the dominant law.
Annette Scambler has pointed out the troublesome business of using the male/female, man/woman binary to challenge the male/female, man/woman binary. Maybe the deployment of orthodox, established patriarchal concepts and frames to ‘absent’ them is unavoidable, but … is there a case for alternative, sci-fi or ‘utopian/dystopian’ fiction here?
There is insufficient space in an introductory blog of this character to do justice to any protagonist, and Irigaray is no exception. I am aware too that, despite holding pro-feminist views, I lack the grounding in (patriarchal, phallocentric) experience, oppression (and often ‘abuse’) that are commonplace for women. What I hope is clear, however, is Irigaray’s grasp and communication of the depth of male tap roots in society, of their resistance to being dug up, and of the potential for – forgive the reference to Bhaskar once more – absenting the absence of women by contesting the constraining ills of patriarchal capitalism! I’ve blogged elsewhere on Bhaskar.
Elliott,A (2009) Contemporary Social Theory: an Introduction. London; Routledge.
Scambler,A (1998) Gender, health and the feminist debate on postmodernism. In Eds Scambler,G & Higgs,P: Modernity, Medicine and Health. London; Routledge.