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

Abstract

In this article we aim to show the potential of cross‐continental dialogues for a decolonizing feminism. We relate the work of one of the major critics of the Western metaphysical patriarchal order, Luce Irigaray, to the critique of the colonial/modern gender system by the Nigerian feminist scholar Oyĕrónké Oyĕwùmí. Oyĕwùmí's work is often rejected based on the argument that it is empirically wrong. We start by problematizing this line of thinking by providing an epistemological interpretation of Oyĕwùmí's claims. We then draw Irigaray and Oyĕwùmí into conversation, and show how this bolsters and helps to further illuminate and contextualize Oyĕwùmí's critique of gender. But the dialogue between these thinkers also reveals significant limitations of Irigaray's philosophy, namely her presumption of the priority of sexual difference, its rigid duality, and her failure to take into account the inextricable intertwinement of gender and race in the Western patriarchal order. Relating Irigaray's critique of Western culture's forgetting of sexual difference to Oyĕwùmí's critique hence demonstrates to what extent Irigaray's philosophy remains typically Western and how she therefore fails to escape the paradigm that she is so critical of.

Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Black Feminist Geographies

“…Oyěwùmí (1997: 14) contends that Yoruba societies are not organised according to visual bodily cues but are more closely linked to metaphysical relationships that link human beings and other species together in ‘the many worlds human beings inhabit’ (see also Nyamnjoh, 2017). These are urgent decolonial questions for Black Feminist Geographies and for Geography as a whole, at a time of climatic crisis: they question not just particularist forms of gendering, including Western forms (Coetzee and Halsema, 2018), but also the concept of gender itself, pushing towards some more profound African and Indigenous questions around how different understandings of the human can reconnect us with the planetary (Gumbs, 2020; Millner, 2021).…”

The Antropology of Gender by Vasil Rosanov and the Ethics of Sexual Difference by Luce Irigaray

“…(Rozanov, 1990, p. 137) Against such a scenario of the development of European civilization, the French philosopher L. Irigary, who, unlike Rozanov, believes that gender is not something understandable and naturally conditioned, tied to the anatomy, but a phenomenon of language and culture, that are androcentric in nature and targeting a person. Therefore, the existing world of culture and language is feasible on behalf of the male subject, from the point of view of a male perspective, where the female is understood as "other" and "alien", and is often ignored at all (Coetzee, & Halsema, 2018). Irigaray opposes such androcentrism, criticizing the concepts of Freud and Lacan, the vivid representatives of this tradition, for their claim to the universality of theories, which in essence are nothing but the implementation of a "correct" description of a woman in patriarchy from the standpoint of a man.…”

“…The methodological basis for the study was made by Rozanov (1990;1995; and Irigarary (1985;"This Sex Which is Not One", 1985;1993;, as well as articles Coetzee, & Halsema, 2018;Galtsin, 2015;, which represent some peculiarities in the concepts of these philosophers.…”