Between Races and Generations: Materializing Race and Kinship in Moraga and Irigaray

Abstract

<jats:p>Juxtaposing Cherríe Moraga's<jats:italic>Loving in the War Years</jats:italic>and Luce Irigaray's<jats:italic>Speculum of the Other Woman</jats:italic>, I explore the ways that sex and race intersect to complicate an Irigarayan account of the relations between mother and daughter. Irigaray's work is an effective tool for understanding the disruptive and potentially healing desire between mothers and daughters, but her insistence on sex as primary difference must be challenged in order to acknowledge the intersectionality of sex and race. Working from recent work on the psychoanalysis of race, I argue that whiteness functions as a master signifier in its own right, and as a means of differentiation between the light‐skinned Moraga and her brown‐skinned mother. Irigaray's concept of blood deepens Moraga's account of her healing and subversive return to her mother. The juxtaposition of Moraga, Irigaray, and contemporary psychoanalysis of race can allow for a necessary revision of Irigaray's psychoanalysis that acknowledges the ways in which sexual difference is indexed by race and sheds new light on her account of the mother–daughter relation.</jats:p>

Returning to the Point of Entanglement: Sexual Difference and Creolization

“…26 However, a growing list of recent scholars interested in sexual/sexuate difference has brought these concerns into dialogue with her work. 27 Irigaray's unique version of sexual difference theory, particularly given its reach toward an invocation of a feminine subject, mentions abortion rights but seems to elide the assumed race neutrality of sexual difference and its historical complicity with colonialism. The failure to attend to sexual difference theory's racial-colonial complicity mirrors the same elision to these concerns in mainstream political women's movements across France.…”

Unsettling Feminist Philosophy: An Encounter with Tracey Moffatt'sNight Cries

“…A similar pattern shows itself on Phil Papers. Two papers in the last decade that explicitly think about mothering in terms of racial dynamics are Hom 2013 and Cisneros 2013. To be certain, the method I've used is coarse and risks overlooking specific work of interest to those who would decolonize motherhood studies (much of which takes place outside of philosophy journals).…”

“…12Much more could be said here about the contributions of these—and other—authors to our understandings of motherhood. See Tatonetti 2004; Hom 2013; and Mayer 2018 for provocative analyses of what Moraga brings to our conversations about mothering and what is lost when her work is erased. To my knowledge, Cordova's work—which speaks about relationality, creation, and origin but not “motherhood” specifically—has not yet been brought to bear on motherhood studies within or outside of philosophy, which further indicates the need to decolonize motherhood studies by contexualizing mother–child relations within larger webs of relationality, creativity, and belonging, including relationship to specific lands and peoples.…”

Sexual Difference and Decolonization: Oyĕwùmí and Irigaray in Dialogue about Western Culture

“…For this reason, we read Oyĕwùmí's critique of the Western colonial system in relation to Luce Irigaray's critique of Western patriarchy (section II), thereby disclosing certain limitations of the latter's Western perspective. Irigaray's singular focus upon sexual difference and exclusion of other differences, such as race, has been under discussion before (Butler and Cornell ; Deutscher ; Stone ; Hom ). We contribute to this discussion by showing that bringing her into dialogue with Oyĕwùmí helps to put into perspective her focus on embodiment and sexual difference as one that is characteristically Western in nature (section III).…”