Not woman enough

Irigaray’s culture of difference

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4367149
AutoresAbigail Bray (Murdoch University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2001
Volumen2
Número3
Páginas311-327
Fecha de publicación2001-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/146470010100200304
OpenAlexW2132462194
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas18

This article examines the limitations associated with Irigaray's concept of a culture of difference. I suggest that her concept of sexual difference depends upon a conservative fiction of sameness. I argue that a fiction of phallic sameness underpins her evangelical championing of difference, and that such a fiction retains a conservative blindness to the complexities of contemporary social relations and erases the positive effects oppositional discourses have had on the culture of modernity. I question the debt Irigaray disavows to other non-difference feminism, her insistence that woman are radically marginalized and suggest that her culture of difference is prescriptive and normative. Egalitarian feminism, understood as a postmodern project, is far more strategic, insofar as it offers a multiply-situated analysis of the relationship between women and power within modernity. I replace Irigaray's negative image of the egalitarian feminist as an unnatural woman with the figure of the cyborg who embraces ontological impurity and strategically works within culture

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Feminism · Modernity · Normative · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · Sexual difference · Situated · Sociology · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Philosophy · Psychology