The Sex of Nature: A Reinterpretation of Irigaray's Metaphysics and Political Thought

Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory to ground a feminist ontology of biology has been particularly controversial. Most critics have understood Grosz as supporting her theory with empirical evidence, and they criticize her for being either inaccurate or uncritical of and overly dependent on science. I argue that Grosz reads Darwin as a philosopher in a Deleuzian and Irigarayan sense, and that Grosz's project is therefore better understood in terms of its ethical and political goals rather than in terms of empirical adequacy. Employing this evaluative framework leads to a novel route for critique of Grosz's ontology in terms of its reliance on the Darwinian distinction between organism and environment. I conclude that Grosz's work is valuable for the way it maintains ethical and political considerations in feminist ontological debates, and that introducing a more sensitive understanding of the organism–environment relation will lead us closer to a truly feminist ontology of biology.

Section: The Task Of Onto‐ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Task Of Onto‐ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating Elizabeth Grosz's Biological Turn

Trappes¹

2019

“…Analyses of Irigaray's recent work have continued to highlight the difficulties in her overall project of according sexual difference primacy. Alison Stone, for example, comments that Irigaray's privileging of sexual difference as a condition of emergence for other “secondary” differences within the sexes (such as that between woman and woman), or as a precondition for “cultural diversities” is “politically ineffectual” (Stone , 78–79). For Stone, this privilege extends to heterosexual relationships, to which Irigaray attributes greater value on the basis that they demand a relation at the most fundamental level (79).…”

Section: The Divine Horizonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, as Stone points out, these “necessary consequences” of Irigaray's recent explorations of sexual difference should not suffer an “over‐hasty” dismissal (Stone , 79). Indeed, I would suggest that Irigaray's notion of divinity is an especially suggestive acknowledgment of the complexity of difference, which cannot be exhausted by her preoccupation with sexual difference.…”

Section: The Divine Horizonmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Divine Horizon: Rethinking Political Community in Luce Irigaray's “Divine Women”

Hinton¹

2013

The question of the transcendent, that which operates above and beyond the material stuff of the world, remains an enduring one for feminism, bound up as it is with the foundations of feminism's corporeal politics and the definition of its political subject. With the specificity of the situated and meaningful body grounding feminist politics, the universal and neutral status of the speaking subject has been diagnosed as masculine, and unable to properly account for sexed differences. On this basis, political community, collectivity forged along the lines of a common identity, is considered important in the realization of feminist political goals, yet is also problematic in view of its reliance upon a universal category of identity through which to motivate for political change. Acknowledging these tensions, this paper revisits Luce Irigaray's essay "Divine Women" to suggest that in her rethinking of the divine as a shared horizon through which women can potentially achieve autonomy, the nature of the transcendent, the universal, and the identity of the feminine are also reconfigured in surprising ways. In a specific address to the dilemma of political community, Irigaray makes available a notion of the divine that is already differently inhabited. THINKING COMMUNITYIn recent decades, feminist scholarship has engaged robustly with what it perceives to be the problematic nature of thought, reason, and knowledge-production, taking up questions of subjectivity and identity quite forcibly through its critique of these categories in an attempt to rethink the thinking subject as an embodied subject. Taking its cue from Luce Irigaray's foregrounding of female specificity, and deeply influenced by her formative work on sexual difference, a generation of feminists has sought to successfully undermine the principles of disembodied, rational subjectivity modeled on Ren e Descartes's cogito, the subject wholly constituted by thought in its irreducible self-presence. As one of Irigaray's most forceful arguments has demonstrated,

“…I will take both Irigaray and Moraga as non‐determinist materialists, and I will argue that, read together, they offer a compelling and useful account of such a materialism. Despite debates over whether to take Irigaray as a realist or as a strategic essentialist, I am persuaded by Alison Stone's interpretation that Irigaray's work presses us to move beyond what has become a sterile standoff in feminist studies between essentialism and social construction in order to revalue the material as active and formative, or, as Stone puts it, as having its own distinct but non‐determinative rhythm (Stone ; ). Working through Irigaray (with certain caveats) can lead to a fruitful return to and revaluation of the material and the body in feminist theory.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Hom¹

2013

Juxtaposing Cherríe Moraga'sLoving in the War Yearsand Luce Irigaray'sSpeculum of the Other Woman, 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.