May 19, 2014

Philosophy essay notes and research:

Freud, S, 1973. ‘Femininity’ New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. 4th ed. London: Pelican.

Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity
Portions of the male sexual apparatus also appear in women’s bodies, though in an atrophied state, and vice versa in the alternative case. It regards their occurrence as indications of bisexuality, as though an individual is not a man or a woman but always both – merely a certain amount more the one than the other.
Since, apart from the very rarest cases, only one kind of sexual product – ova or semen – is nevertheless present in one person, you are bound to have doubts as to the decisive significance of those elements and must conclude that what constitutes masculinity or femininity is an unknown characteristic which anatomy cannot lay hold of.
Can psychology do so perhaps? We are accustomed to employ ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as mental qualities. … We speak of a person, whether male or female, as behaving in a masculine way in one connection and in a feminine way in another.
The distinction is not a psychological one; when you say ‘masculine’, you usually mean ‘active’, and when you say ‘feminine’, you usually mean ‘passive’.
The male sex-cell in actively mobile and searches out the female one, and the latter, the ovum, is immobile and waits passively.
Even in the sphere of human sexual life you soon see how inadequate it is to make masculine behaviour coincide with activity and feminine with passivity. A mother is active in every sense towards her child; the act of lactation itself may equally be described as the mother suckling the baby or as her being sucked by it.
—> Contradicts himself?
Women can display great activity in various directions, men are not able to live in company with their own kind unless they develop a large amount of passive adaptability.
One might consider characterizing femininity psychologically as giving preference to passive aims.
It is perhaps the case that in a woman, a preference for passive behaviour and passive aims is carried over into her life to a greater or lesser extent in proportion to the limits, restricted or far-reaching, within which her sexual life thus serves as a model. But we must beware in this of underestimating the influence of social customs, which similarly force women into passive situations.
Psychology too is unable to solve the riddle of femininity
We know nothing about it, yet the existence of two sexes is a most characteristic of organic life which distinguishes it sharply from inanimate nature.
Psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is – that would be a task it could scarcely perform – but sets about inquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition.
The discussion of this has gained special attractiveness from the distinction between the sexes. For the ladies, whenever some comparison seemed to turn out unfavourable to their sex, were able to utter a suspicion that we, the male analysts, had been unable to overcome certain deeply rooted prejudices against what was feminine, and that this was being paid for in the partiality of our researches. We, on the other hand, standing on the ground of bisexuality, had no difficulty in avoiding impoliteness. We had only to say: ‘This doesn’t apply to you. You’re the exception; on this point you’re more masculine than feminine.’
A little girl is as a rule less aggressive, defiant and self-sufficient; she seems to have a greater need for being shown affection and on that account to be more dependent and pliant.
One gets an impression, too, that little girls are more intelligent and livelier than boys of the same age; they go our more to meet the external world and at the same time form stronger object-cathexes.
Analysis of children’s play has shown our women analysts that the aggressive impulses of little girls leave nothing to be desired in the way of abundance and violence. With their entry into the phallic phase the differences between the sexes are completely eclipsed by their agreements. We are now obliged to recognize that the little girl is a little man. In boys, as we know, this phase is marked by the fact that they have learnt how to desire pleasurable sensations from their small penis and connect its excited start with their ideas of sexual intercourse. Little girls do the same thing with their still smaller clitoris. It seems that with them all their masturbatory acts are carried out on this penis-equivalent, and that the truly feminine vagina is still undiscovered by both sexes.
A boy’s mother is the first object of his love, and she remains so too during the formation of his Oedipus complex and, in essence, all through his life (–> Oedipus son article relates here). For a girl too her first object must be her mother.
But in the Oedipus situation the girl’s father has become her love-object, and we expect that in the normal course of development she will find her way from this paternal object to her final choice of an object. (–> Could talk her about traditionally women are ‘given away’ at weddings, change from father’s to new husband’s last name, etc) In the course of time, therefore, a girl has to change her erotogenic zone and her object – both of which a boy retains. The question then arises of how this happens: in particular, how does a girl pass from her mother to an attachment to her father? or, in other words, how does she pass from her masculine phase to the feminine one to which she is biologically destined?
The single question of what it is that brings this powerful attachment of the girl to her mother to an end. This, as we know, is its usual fate: it is destined to make room for an attachment to her father.
This step in development does not involve only a simple change of object. The turning away from the mother is accompanied by hostility; the attachment to the mother ends in hate. A hate of that kind may become very striking and last all through life.
The reproach against the mother which goes back furthest is that she gave the child too little milk – which is construed against her as lack of love.
The fear of being poisoned is also probably connected with the withdrawal of the breast. Poison is nourishment that makes one ill. Perhaps children trace back their early illnesses too to this frustration.
The next accusation against the child’s mother flares up when the next baby appears in the nursery.
What the child grudges the unwanted intruder and rival is not only the suckling but all the other signs of maternal care. It feels that it has been dethroned, despoiled, prejudiced in its rights; it casts a jealous hatred upon the new baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother which often finds expression in a disagreeable change in its behaviour. It becomes ‘naughty’, perhaps, irritable and disobedient
A powerful tendency to aggressiveness is always present beside a powerful love, and the passionately a child loves its object the more sensitive does it become to disappointments and frustrations from that object; and in the end the love must succumb to the accumulated hostility.
The castration complex
The discovery that she is castrated is a turning-point in a girl’s growth. Three possible lines of development start from it: one leads to sexual inhibition or to neurosis, the second to change of character in the sense of a masculinity complex, the third, finally, to normal femininity.
The essential content of the first is as follows: the little girl has hitherto lived in a masculine way, has been able to get pleasure by the excitation of her clitoris and has brought this activity into relation with her sexual wishes directed towards her mother, which are often active ones; now, owing to the influence of her penis-envy, she loses her enjoyment in her phallic sexuality. Her self-love is mortified by the comparison with the boy’s far superior equipment and in consequence she renounces her masturbatory satisfaction from her clitoris, repudiates her love for her mother and at the same time not infrequently represses a good part of her sexual trends in general.
Her love was directed to her phallic mother; with the discovery that her mother is castrated it becomes possible to drop her as an object, so that the motives for hostility, which have long been accumulating, gain the upper hand. This means, therefore, that as a result of the discovery of women’s lack of a penis they are debased in value for girls just as they are for boys and later perhaps for men.
If envy for the penis has provoked a powerful impulse against clitoridal masturbation but this nevertheless refuses to give way, a violent struggle for liberation ensues in which the girl, as it were, herself takes over the role of her deposed mother and gives expression to her entire dissatisfaction with her inferior clitoris in her efforts against obtaining satisfaction from it.
Along with abandonment of clitorial masturbation a certain amount of activity is renounced. Passivity now has the upper hand, and the girl’s turning to her father is accomplished principally with the help of passive instinctual impulses.
The wish with which the girl turns to her father is no doubt originally the wish for the penis which her mother has refused her and which she now expects from her father. The feminine situation is only established, however, if the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby, if, that is, a baby takes the places of a penis in accordance with an ancient symbolic equivalence.
With the transference of the wish for a penis-baby on to her father, the girl has entered the situation of the Oedipus complex. Her hostility to her mother, which did not need to be freshly created, is now greatly intensified, for she becomes the girl’s rival, who receives from her father everything that she desires from him.
The castration complex prepares for the Oedipus complex instead of destroying it; the girl is driven out of her attachment to her mother through the influence of her envy for the penis and she enters the Oedipus situation as though into a haven of refuge.
We mentioned as the second possible reaction to the discovery of female castration the development of a powerful masculinity complex. By this we mean that the girl refuses, as it were, to recognize the unwelcome fact and, defiantly rebellious, even exaggerates her previous masculinity, clings to her clitoridal activity and takes refuge in an identification with her phallic mother or her father.
The extreme achievement of such a masculinity complex would appear to be the influencing of the choice of an object in the sense of manifest homosexuality. Analytic experience teaches us, to be sure, that female homosexuality is seldom or never a direct continuation of infantile masculinity.
There is only one libido, which serves both the masculine and the feminine sexual functions.
The sexual frigidity of women … is a phenomenon that is still insufficiently understood.
We attribute a larger amount of narcissism to femininity, which also affects women’s choice of object, so that to be loved is a stronger need for them that to love. The effect of penis-envy has a share, further, in the physical vanity of women, since they are bound to value their charms more highly as a late compensation for their original sexual inferiority.
The determinants of women’s choice of an object are often made unrecognizable by social conditions. Where the choice is able to show itself freely, it is often made in accordance with the narcissistic ideal of the man whom the girl had wishes to become. If the girl has remained in her attachment to her father – that is, in the Oedipus complex – her choice is made according to the paternal type.
Another alteration in a woman’s nature, for which lovers are unprepared, may occur in a marriage after the first child is born. Under the influence of a woman’s becoming a mother herself, an identification with her own mother may be revived, against which she had striven up till the time of her marriage, and this may attract all the available libido to itself, so that the compulsion to repeat reproduces an unhappy marriage between her parents.
A mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son; this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships. A mother can transfer to her son the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can expect from him the satisfaction of all that has been left over in her of her masculinity complex. Even a marriage is not made secure until the wife has succeeded in making her husband her child as well and in acting as a mother to him.

Irigaray, L. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, pp.23-33.

Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters. Thus the opposition between “masculine” clitoral activity and “feminine” vaginal passivity, an opposition which Freud saw as stages, or alternatives, in the development of a sexually “normal” woman, seems rather too clearly required by the practice of male sexuality. For the clitoris is conceived as a little penis pleasant to masturbate so long as castration anxiety does not exist (for the boy child), and the vagina is valued for the “lodging” it offers the make organ when the forbidden hand has to find a replacement for pleasure-giving.
In these terms, woman’s erogenous zones never amount to anything but a clitoris-sex that is not comparable to the noble phallic organ, or a hole-envelope that serves to sheathe and massage the penis in intercourse: a non-sex, or a masculine organ turned back upon itself, self-embracing.
About woman and her pleasure. … Her lot is that of “lack”, “atrophy” (of the sexual organ), and “penis envy,” the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value.
woman’s autoeroticism is very different from a man’s. In order to touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a woman’s body, language… And this self-caressing requires at least a minimum of activity.
Woman “touches herself” all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two – but not divisible in one(s) – that caress each other.
This autoeroticism is disrupted by a violent break-in: the brutal separation of the two lips by a violating penis
Woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies. That she may find pleasure there in that role, by proxy, is possible, even certain. But such pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own, and it leaves her in a familiar state of dependency upon man. Not knowing what she wants, ready for anything, even asking for more, so long as he will “take” her as his “object” when he seeks his own pleasure. Thus she will not say what she herself wants; moreover, she does not know, or no longer knows, what she wants.
Woman’s desire would not be expected to speak the same language as man’s; woman’s desire has doubtless been submerged by the logic that has dominated the West since the time of the Greeks.
Within this logic, the predominance of the visual, and of the discrimination and individualization of form, is particularly foreign to female eroticism. Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking, and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: sh eis to the beautiful object of contemplation. While her body finds itself thus eroticized, and called to a double movement of exhibition and of chaste retreat in order to stimulate the drives of the “subject,” her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see.
The one of form, of the individual, of the (male) sexual organ, of the proper name, of the proper meaning…supplants, while separating and dividing, that contact of at least two (lips) which keeps woman in touch with herself, but without any possibility of distinguishing what is touching from what is touched.
She is neither one nor two.
She resists all adequate definition. … And her sexual organ, which is not one organ, is counted as none. The negative, the underside, the reverse of the only visible and morphologically designatable organ (even if the passage from erection to detumescence does pose some problems): the penis.
Maternity fills the gaps in a repressed female sexuality.
Man’s desire and woman’s are strangers to each other.
So woman does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural.
Indeed, woman’s pleasure does not have to choose between clitoral activity and vaginal passivity, for example. The pleasure of the vaginal caress does not have to be substituted for that of the clitoral caress. They each contribute, irreplaceably, to woman’s pleasure. Among other caresses… Fondling the breasts, touch the vulva, spreading the lips, stroking the posterior wall of the vagina, brushing against the mouth of the uterus, and so on.
It is useless, then, to trap women in the exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so that is will be clear; they are already elsewhere in the discursive machinery where you expected to surprise them. They have returned within themselves.
They do not have the interiority that you have, the one you perhaps suppose they have.
And if you ask them insistently what they are thinking about, they can only reply: Nothing Everything.
Woman is traditionally a use-value for man, an exchange value among men; in other words, a commodity.
Women are marked phallicly by their fathers, husbands, procurers. And this branding determines their value in sexual commerce. Woman is never anything but the locus of a more or less competitive exchange between two men, including the competition for the possession of mother earth.
For women to undertake tactical strikes; to keep themselves apart from men long enough to learn to defend their desire, especially through speech, to discover the love of other women while sheltered from men’s imperious choices that put them in the position of rival commodities, to forge for themselves a social status that compels recognition, to earn their living in order to escape from the condition of prostitute… these are certainly indispensable stages in the escape from their proletarization on the exchange market. But if their aim were simply to reverse the order of things, even supposing this to be possible, history would repeat itself in the long run, would revert to sameness: to phallocratism. It would leave room neither for women’s sexuality, nor for women’s imaginary, nor for women’s language to take (their) place.

Cox, E. (2011). Cox: a centenary of continuous struggle for women –. [online] Crikey.com.au. Available at: http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/03/08/cox-a-centenary-of-continuous-struggle-for-women/ [Accessed 29 May. 2014].

If I wanted an example of the misuse of feminism, it arrived this morning in a headline from the Herald Sun: “Influential women in push for super boost”. The article shoes clearly how feminism is easily co-opted by blokey econmics and why inequality between men and women was increasing and also between women.
Superannuation is a good template for explaining why gender inequality is stalling and sometimes going backwards. The equal pay cases of the ’70s closed the obvious gaps between men’s and women’s pay but failed to tackle lower pay rates for feminised occupations or the biases in assumptions of what women’s work was worth. So we still have a 17% pay gap in average hourly rates. Add to that the likelihood that women will take time out and work fewer hours to cope with the major share of unpaid care, it is obvious that they will earn less over a life time than men.
The current system substantially reduces the tax obligations of top income tax bracket payers but overtaxes those with low or no incomes, who are mostly female. So superannuation increases the gaps between higher and lower income earners in retirement, and access to pensions at the bottom end does not compensate for this.
The past 20 or so years have seen few major changes that matched those in the earlier years. Then, we made the obvious changes that seriously irked women in the mid-century years in which we grew up. We have removed the laws that formally restricted our access to certain jobs, paid work, promotion or to other goods and services.
This means that overt sex discrimination is now neither obvious nor legally acceptable. We changed how some issues were once defined or ignored: violence in families is no longer private; there are funded (and controlled) women’s services; we have more child care but it’s now commercialised and still too expensive.
There are, however, many questions on where we are now and are going. … There are relatively few women in high positions in the media, arts, law and medicine despite being majorities of graduates. The pay gap is increasing and the cultures of most workplaces remain focused on male-style long house and unbalanced commitments.

Irigaray, L. 1985. The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine. Translated by: C. Porter and C. Burke, This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, pp.68 – 85.

What is important is to disconcert the staging of representation according to exclusively “masculine” parameters, that is, according to a phallocratic order.
Freud brought to light something that had been operative all along though it remained implicit, hidden, unknown: the sexual indifference that underlies the truth of any science, the logic of every discourse.
Sexuality is never defined with respect to any sex but the masculine. Freud does not see two sexes whose differences are articulated in the act of intercourse, and, more generally speaking, in the imaginary and symbolic processes that regulate the workings of a society and culture.
The “feminine” is always described in terms of deficiency or atrophy, as the other side of the sex that alone holds a monopoly on value: the male sex.
How can we accept the idea that woman’s entire sexual development is governed by her lack of, and thus by her longing for, jealousy of, and demand for, the male organ?
All Freud’s statements describing feminine sexuality overlook the fact that the female sex might possibly have its own “specificity.”
The desire to have a child, for a woman, signifies the desire to possess at last the equivalent of the penis; the relationship among women is governed either by rivalry for the possession of the “male organ” or, in homosexuality, by identification with the man.
Woman herself is never at issue in these statements: the feminine is defined as the necessary complement to the operation of male sexuality
No science is ever perfected: science too has its history
We now know that the ovum is not as passive as Freud claims, and that it chooses a spermatozoon for itself to at least as great an extent as it is chosen.
Freud needs this support from anatomy in order to justify a theoretical position especially in his description of woman’s sexual development. “What can we do?” he writes in this connection, transposing Napoleon’s phrase: “Anatomy is destiny.”
Heir to an “ideology” that he does not call into question, Freud asserts that the “masculine” is the sexual model, that no representation of desire can fail to take it as the standard, can fail to submit to it.
Since the recognition of a “specific” female sexuality would challenge the monopoly on value held by the masculine sex alone, in the final analysis by the father, what meaning could the Oedipus complex have in a symbolic system other than patriarchy?
We need to pay attention to the way the unconscious works in each philosophy, and perhaps in philosophy in general. We need to listen (psycho)analytically to its procedures of repression, to the structuration of language that shores up its representations, separating the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, and so forth.
Even with the help of linguistics, psychoanalysis cannot solve the problem of the articulation of the female sex in discourse.
There is, in an initial phase, perhaps only one “path,” the one historically assigned to the feminine: that of mimicry. Once must assume the feminine role deliberately.
To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself … to “ideas,” in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by masculine logic, but so as to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible.
Feminine pleasure has to remain inarticulate in language, in its own language, if it is not to threaten the underpinnings of logical operations. And so what is most strictly forbidden to women today is that they should attempt to express their own pleasure.
We need to proceed in such a way that linear reading is no longer possible: that is, the retroactive impact of the end of each word, utterance, or sentence upon its beginning must be taken into consideration in order to undo the power of its teleological effect, including its deferred action.
Every operation on and in philosophical language … possesses implications that … are nonetheless politically determined.
The first question to ask is therefore the following: how can women analyze their own exploitation, inscribe their own demands, within an order prescribed by the masculine? Is a women’s politics possible within that order? What transformation in the political process itself does it require?
When women’s movements challenge the forms and nature of political life, the contemporary play of powers and power relations, they are in fact working toward a modification of women’s status. On the other hand, when these same movements aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, then they are resubjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order.
But to what reality would woman correspond, independently of her reproductive function? It seems that two possible roles are available to her, roles that are occasionally or frequently contradictory. Woman could be man’s equal. In this case she would enjoy, in a more or less near future, the same economic, social, political rights as men.
But on the exchange market … woman would also have to preserve and maintain what is called femininity. The value of a woman would accrue to her from her maternal role, and, in addition, from her “femininity.” But in fact that “femininity” is a role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation. In this masquerade of femininity, the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on the femininity. The fact remains that this masquerade requires an effort on her part for which she is not compensated.
Women’s social inferiority is reinforced and complicated by the fact that woman does not have access to language, except through recourse to “masculine” systems of representation which disappropriate her from her relation to herself and to other women. The “feminine” is never to be identified except by and for the masculine, the reciprocal proposition not being “true.”
And one that would doubtless interpret in a different way the impact of the economy of discourse on the analysis of relations of production.
For, without the exploitation of the body-matter of women, what would become of the symbolic process that governs society?
That would not fail to challenge the discourse that lays down the law today, that legislates on everything, including sexual difference, to such an extent that the existence of another sex, of an other, that would be woman, still seems, in its terms, unimaginable.

Irigaray, L. 1977. “Women’s exile”. Trans. Couze Venn. Ideology and Consciousness Vol 1, 62-76.

The question of language is closely allied to that of feminine sexuality. For I do not think that language is universal, or neutral with regard to the differences between the sexes. In the face of language, constructed and maintained by men only, I raise the questions of the specificity of a feminine language: of a language which would be adequate for the body, sex and the imagination (imaginary) of a woman. A language which presents itself as universal, and which is in fact produced by men only, is this not what maintains the alienation and exploitation of women in and by society?
It is not simply a comparison [of men and women within a symmetrical frame] … since the feminine is in fact defined in it as nothing other than the complement, the other side, or the negative side, of the masculine; thus, the female sex is described as a lack, a ‘hole’. Freud, and psycho-analysts following him maintain that the only desire on the part of the woman, when she discovers she has “no sex”, is to have a penis, ie the only sexual organ which is recognized and valued.
As long as power is only in the hands of the male, the ‘other’ – woman – can only appear as a lack or a negative.
It’s an attempt which constitutes the female sex as the complement and the opposite necessary to the economy of the male sex. It is thus a complete misunderstanding of the specificity of the female, and a refusal, or rather an inability to recognize its existence and autonomy.
Any account of female sexuality which can be reduced to local and specific questions, in the end only serves to perpetuate the system.
It is not a matter of naively accusing Freud, as if her were a ‘bastard’. Freud’s discourse represents the symptom of a particular social and cultural economy which has been maintained in the West at least since the Greeks.
I have tried to find what the specific modes of functioning of the female sex and ‘imaginary’ could be. Instead of, first of all, stopping at the ‘parts’ of this sex, such as they are defined in masculine parameters: the vagina or the home of the penis, the mechanism for producing children, or even, breasts (which can be will-nilly, represented metaphorically as phallic), I’m trying to say that the female sex would be, above all, made up of ‘two lips’. These two lips of the female sex make it once and for all a return to unity, because they are always at least two, and that one can never determine of these two, which is one, which is the other: they are continually interchanging. They are neither identifiable nor separable one from the other.
These ‘two lips’ are always joined in an embrace.
You may perhaps be able to see that when one starts from the “two lips” of the female sex, the dominant discourse finds itself baffled: there can no longer be a unity in the subject, for instance. There will always therefore be a plurality in feminine language.
A feminine language would undo the unique meaning, the proper meaning of words, of nouns: which still regulates all discourse.
The idea has been introduced in women’s imagination that their pleasure lies in ‘producing’ children: which amounts to bending them to the values of production, even before they have had an occasion to examine their pleasure.
There is no privilege of the orgasmic unity for women: she does not enjoy just one orgasm, nor necessarily a determined orgasm, in only one definite and definitive manner.
The pleasure of a woman is always multiple, and not of course uniquely genital. When she begins to contract on the edge of a genital orgasm, she effectively loses the world of her pleasure.
Whatever may be the inequalities between women, they all suffer, even unconsciously, the same oppression, the same exploitation of their body, the same denial of their desire. That’s why it is very important for women to unite, and to unite ‘among themselves’. So that they may begin to escape from the places, the roles, the gestures which have been assigned and taught to them by the society of men. So that they may love each other, whilst men have organized ‘de facto’ a rivalry between women.
The exploitation of women is not a regional problem situated inside politics, and which would only involve a ‘section’ of the population, or a ‘part’ of the social ‘body’. When women want to escape from exploitation, they do not simply destroy a few ‘prejudices’: they upset the whole set of the dominant values – economic, social, moral, sexual. They challenge every theory, every thought, every existing language, in that these are monopolised by men only. They question the very foundation of our social and cultural order, the organization of which has been prescribed by the patriarchal system.
No political perspective has as yet examined its relation to phallocratic power.
In concrete terms, this means that women must continue to struggle for equal pay, for social rights, against discrimination, at work, in education etc. But that is not enough: women who are simply ‘equal’ to men would be ‘like them’, and therefore not women. Once more, the sexual difference would be cancelled, misunderstood and glossed over. One must invent, amongst women, new forms of organization, new forms of struggle, new challenges.
The institution, hierarchies, authority – ie, the existing forms of political systems – belong to men’s world, not ours.
One discovers here the question of the criteria of universality which dominate the whole of Western thought, and thus psychoanalysis. When one defines the unconscious in terms of universal characteristics, one does not wonder whether these characteristics are valid for women also.
When psycho-analysis assert that the Oedipus complex is an ‘immutable’ structure, ‘universal’, that seems to me to be ahistorical, and, indeed, naive. Why should what is effectively universal in the patriarchal system be so in an altogether different kind of society?
Western thought has been dominated by the physics and the mechanics of solid matter, whereas the feminine refers much more to mechanics of fluids, which has barely been elaborated. This misunderstanding of the specificity of an economy of fluids has an effect even on the representation of male sexuality itself; why, for instance, has such little emphasis been placed on the fluidity of the sperm? It has always been considered as being used to make solids: children.
It is quite false to say that there is no specific female desire. It is a specific social and cultural structure which deprives women of their desire and of the possibility of their expressing it, because language and the systems of representation cannot ‘translate’ that desire. According to this, women are effectively totally lost, “outside of themselves”, and they no longer know what they themselves want because they submit, through the fear of being left on the self, to the existing order.
When J. Lacan bemoans: “I beg them on my knees to tell me what they want and they tell me nothing”, why does he not hear what is at issue here? It is because he situates himself in the functioning of language and of desire in which women cannot say anything, and in which he cannot hear them, even if they were to begin to speak to him.
If a woman tries to express her pleasure – which, obviously, challenges his male point of view – he excludes her, because she upsets his system. Thus, soon after Speculum was published, I was sacked from the University where I was teaching. … The meaning of this expulsion is clear: only men may say what female pleasure consists of. Women are not allowed to speak, otherwise they challenge the monopoly of discourse and of theory exerted by men.
One always find the same question: that of the so-called universality of language and of the existing culture. What is its foundation?
It is still the man who generally chooses ‘his’ women. For centuries men have been polygamous – without anybody bothering to ask women if they liked it. But when today a woman tries to be polyandrous, this creates such enormous problems of interaction with men that it can only be sustained with difficulty. This has to do with the fact that it is male fantasms which dominate the sexual scene, not those of women.
When one examines what is presented as ‘female fantasies’ by magazines, sexology books, pornography, etc, one only finds in fact, induced images, and not an ‘imaginary’ which would correspond to the specificity of female sexuality. There are nothing but rapes, violence, penetrations described as breaking and entering, female orgasms functioning as the proof of male power, an over evaluation of the size of the male sex, etc: thus representations of the effect on women of male desire, and symptoms of the way in which women is subjected to this desire’s economy.
Whatever be the evolution and the changes that have happened [women are no longer tied to the family, to domestic life, in the same way as before], women continue, on the whole, to reproduce and bring up children, make the food and service men. Thus, they still ensure the social basis which enables exchange between men. From the moment that a man has a family, when ‘his’ wife reproduces and maintains through her work the life, desire, of the man, we have a form in which the appropriation of women’s bodies is perpetuated, as a condition for the reproduction of the social order. Further, a man always takes ‘his’ woman from another man, against whom, in one way or another, he compares his phallic power and prestige.
Suppose there were a general strike by women. That is perhaps he only thing that would radically threaten capitalism. … And I mean a strike by all women, not just working women. I cannot imagine how the social order could manage, its reproduction would come to a halt.
Nearly all women are in some state of madness: shut up in their bodies, in their silence and their ‘home’. This kind of imprisonment means that they live their madness without it being noticed. This is perhaps why feminine madness is less explicit and, above all, less socially disruptive.

Grosz, E, 1989. Luce Irigaray and sexual difference. Sexual Subversion: Three French Feminists, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, pp.104-139.

[Irigaray] is clearly critical of Freud’s presumptions and conclusions insofar as they cast women into a secondary, dependent position by cultural necessity
Psychoanalytic theory can itself be read as a symptom of a broader, underlying cultural and intellectual misogyny.
Freud deduces (rather than observes) a femininity that complements males development, and satisfies men’s needs.
Phallocentrism is the use of one model of subjectivity, the male, by which all others are positively or negatively defined.
Irigaray’s aim, among other things, is the recategorisation of women and femininity so that they are now capable of being autonomously defined according to women’s and not men’s interests.
Whenever the two sexes are conceived as identical, as opposites or as complements, one of the two terms defines the position of the other. This is clear in cases of personal or sexual identity: one term is taken as the norm against which the other is measured. When the one conforms to the other – when the two are ‘equal’ – an identity is posited. In complementarity … one term is taken as given, in need of completion or complementarity, while the other is regarded only insofar as it serves to satisfy this need.
We live in a resolutely homosexual culture, a culture based on the primacy of the male, the homme, who can function only with others modelled on himself, others who are his mirror reflections.
As Irigaray observes, in psychoanalysis the female development is only conceptualised in three ways: in the pre-oedipal period, Freud describes the little girl as a ‘little man’; her libido is masculine whether directed to male or female love objects; and her sexuality is ‘phallic’. In other words, the pre-oedipal girl is seen as the same or identical with the boy.
The girl is confronted with the ‘fact’ of her castration, her ‘lack’ of the organ which empowers men … she is relegated to the position of castrated, passive object, who seeks, not (actively) to desire, but (passively) to be desired.
If psychoanalysis reduces women to an identity or sameness with men – by posing identity, opposition or complementarity as women’s only possibilities – one of Irigaray’s major concerns is to free the conceptual space left by phallocentric discourses for a more adequate representation of woman.
Irigaray thus uses psychoanalysis to criticise itself and other phallocentric texts; and to provide a starting point in the positive construction of other images and representations.
Bother clitoral and vaginal models are phallocentric. They privilege a phallic, masculine model of sexuality. For example, clitoral conceptions of female sexuality consider the clitoris homologous to the penis, ‘only smaller’. The vaginal conception, while not similar to male sexuality, is the complement to the penis, its ‘completion’ and harmonious counterpart, always defined with respect to the primacy of his organ, not in its own terms.
For Irigaray, feminine pleasure is not singular, unified, hierarchically subordinated to a single organ, definable or locatable according to the logic of identity.
[Irigaray’s] image stresses the multiplicity, ambiguity, fluidity, and excessiveness, of female sexuality; it evokes a remainder or residue of jouissance left unrepresnted in a phallic libidinal economy.
Female sexuality could be positively represented by the metaphor of the ‘two lips’. The two lips are never one, nor strictly two. They are one and two simultaneously: where one identity ends and another begins is never clear. (The idea of ‘one lip’ seems absurd!) This image defies binary categories and forms of classification, being undecidably inside and outside, one and two, genital and oral.
The ‘two lips’ is not a truthful image of female anatomy but a new emblem by which female sexuality can be positively represented. For Irigaray, the problem for women is not the experience or recognition of female pleasure, but its representation, which actively constructs women’s experience of their corporeality and pleasures. If female sexuality and desire are represented in some relation to male sexuality, they are submerged in a series of male-defined constraints.
It accords women activity, satisfaction, and a corporeal self-sufficiency usually denied them in heterosexist cultures. It presents women as both active and passive, able to find pleasure in intercourse with men or making love with women (or in masturbation or celibacy) according to their desire. Irigaray’s metaphor makes clear the limited alternatives that the clitoral/vaginal debate imposes on women’s pleasure. The ‘two lips’ is an indecideable image that is both genital and extragenitally polymorphous.
Her purpose is to displace male models, rather than to accurately reflect what female sexuality really is.
Not having one identity, one location, one organ or one orgasm, female sexuality has been understood as no identity or sexuality. Irigaray accepts the phallocentric image of woman as ‘not one’ but reverses its meaning: if woman is ‘not one’, she is more than one. The two lips, fluidity, are a plenitude, a form of auto-erotic self containment. They require nothing external to be satisfied. The penis may be the object of women’s desire but need not be.
Born of woman’s body, man devises religion, philosophy and true knowledges not simply as sublimations of his desire, but as forms of disavowal of this maternal debt.
As the silent unrecognised support – the ‘mute substratum’ – of culture, she must remain unacknowledged, confined to a predesignated reproductive function. As mother, her material and economic possibilities are severely limited. Cut off from social and sexual recognition, she becomes either the mother who gives too much of herself; or the mother who gives too little. These represent two extremes of maternity in a culture which refuses to acknowledge the woman who is (and is more than) the mother.
It is not the mother’s lack, her castration, as Freud implies, which produces a constricted mothering, in which the child is equivalent to a mother’s phallus, but an excess or plenitude of love that can find no other form of expression that through tending the child. This excessive generosity defines the ‘good’ mother, and its negative counterpart is the ‘bad’ mother, the mother who never gives enough, who keeps the child clamouring for more (love/food/attention/desire).
If the woman’s maternal genealogy is made difficult by the covering of woman’s ‘family’ name with her husband’s, it is made impossible by a history of representations and knowledges surrounding women’s ‘nature’, social roles, function in the divine order, etc.
Irigaray suggests that it may be necessary for the daughter to five up the mother as haven, refuge and shelter. In exchange for this apparent loss, the daughter may, for the first time, be able to relate to the mother as a woman.
Instead of being the objects exchanged between one many and another, Irigaray advocates the two women taking on an active subject-to-subject relation. It is for this reason that she suggests the mother must give the daughter more than food to nourish her, she may also give her words with which to speak and hear.
Patriarchy does not prevent women from speaking; it refuses to listen when women do not speak ‘universal’, that is, as men.
In Freud’s understanding, women can take up a post-oedipal or symbolic position only in one of two ways: they can identify with men, acting and speaking as is their were no difference, in which case they suffer from what Freud calls the ‘masculinity complex’; or they can accept their ‘castration’ and their ‘inferiority’ to men, and accept a symbolic position only through the mediation of men.
For Irigaray, women’s autonomy implies women’s right to speak, and listen, as women.
To speak as woman means to undo the reign of the ‘proper’ – the proper name, property, propriety, self-proximity. It means to evoke rather than designate, to overflow and exceed all boundaries and oppositions. It involved speaking from a position in the middle of the binaries (the so-called position of the ‘excluded middle’), affirming bother poles while undoing their polarisation.
If women are defined according to masculine interests, given no place as active, self-defined subjects and no language to speak their specificity, then how is change possible?
When faced with the oedipal interdict prohibiting her corporeal relation with the moth, Freud suggests that the girl has three options: she can accept her castration (‘normal femininity’); she can refuse her castration and consider herself phallic (‘the masculinity complex’); or she can renounce her ‘inferior’ clitoral pleasures and refuse to convert her sexual organ and orientation to vaginal (paternal) heterosexuality (‘frigidity’).
Frigidity, it should be noted, is not a refusal of sexual pleasure per se. It is the refusal of a specifically genital and orgasmic sexual pleasure. The so-called ‘frigid woman’ is precisely the woman whose pleasures do not it neatly into the male-defines structure of sexual pleasure, a teleological structure directed towards an orgasmic goal.
Irigaray’s strategy is not to use the rules to win (the game is in any case rigged) but to disrupt the old game in order to initiate new ones, ‘jamming the theoretical machinery’ in order to enable new ‘tools’, inventions and knowledges to be possible.

Irigaray, L. 1995. The Question of the Other. Yale French Studies, Vol. 87, pp. 7-19.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, more attention has been paid to the question of the other. … children, the mad, “savages,” workers, for example.
Not everyone was the same, and it was important to pay a bit more attention to others and to their diversity. Yet the fundamental model of the human being remained unchanged: one, singular, solitary, historically masculine, the paradigmatic Western adult male, rational, capable.
Others were only copies of the idea of man, a potentially perfect idea, which all the more or less imperfect copies had to struggle to equal. These imperfect copies were, moreover, not defined in and of themselves, in other words, as a different subjectivity, but rather were defined in terms of an ideal subjectivity and as a function of their inadequacies with respect to that ideal: age, reason, race, culture, and so on.
Instead of saying, “I do not want to be the other of the masculine subject and, in order to avoid being that other, I claim to be his equal [as Simone de Beauvoir identifies woman],” I say, “The question of the other have been poorly formulated in the Western tradition, for the other is always seen as the other of the same, the other of the subject itself, rather than an/other subject, irreducible to the masculine subject and sharing equivalent dignity.
Instead of refusing to be the other gender, the other sex, what I ask is to be considered as actually an/other woman, irreducible to the masculine subject.
The philosophical subject, historically masculine, has reduced all otherness to a relationship with himself – as complement, projection, flip side, instrument, nature – inside her world, his horizons.
My critiques of Freud all come down to a single interpretation: you (Freud) only see the sexuality, and more generally the identity, of the little girl, the adolescent girl, or woman in terms of the sexuality and identity of the little boy, the adolescent boy, or man.
To get out from under this all-powerful model of the one and the many, we must move on to the model of the two, a two which is not a replication of the same, nor one large and the other small, but made up of two which are truly different.
The particularities of the feminine world – a world different from that of man – with respect to language, with respect to the body (to age, to health, to beauty, and of, to maternity), with respect to work, with respect to nature and the world of culture. … I attempt to show that life’s unfolding is different for a woman than it is for a man, since it consists for women of much more pronounced physical stages (puberty, loss of virginity, maternity, menopause) and requires a subjective becoming which is far more complex than man’s.
Women prefer the present and future tenses, contiguity, a concrete environment, relations based on difference; they prefer being with, being two; men, on the other hand, prefer the past tense, metaphor, abstract transposition, relationships between likes, but only through a relationship with the object, relationships between the one and many.
Men and women thus occupy different subjective configurations and different worlds.

Grosvenor, E. 2014. My son’s Oedipus complex. [online] Salon.com. Available at: http://www.salon.com/2014/05/12/my_sons_oedipus_complex/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow [Accessed 13 May. 2014].

“All little boys love their mothers,” they said. “Little boys love their mothers differently,” they said. “Wait until he asks you to marry him!” they said. But they didn’t say anything about the tongue kissing, … or the way a tiny tyrant of a child might, despite the meticulous detail with which you have built your marriage and your family, decide he can replace his father.

Grosz, E. 1992. Phallus: Feminist Implications. In: E. Wright, ed., Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, Blackwell, pp.320-322.

Why [does Freud] describe the mother as phallic, rather than as simply powerful? There is clearly more at stake here than any simple attribution of power or powerlessness: the crucial political question is that of who defines female sexuality, in whose hands – and mouths – the power of definition lies.
Feminists can’t afford to ignore the a priori privileging of the masculine within his account, nor can they too readily accept Lacan’s claim that the phallus is a signifier like any other. It is clear from his account that the phallus is a master signifier, the ‘signifier of signifiers’, the term around which all other signifiers revolve. The phallus cannot be regarded simply as a neutral term which positions both sexes within the extra-familial social field, the for effects of such positioning are very different, and the narcissistic ‘wound’ to the woman’s body depicted by the castration fantasy is the unspoken cost of men’s positions of social and sexual primacy.

Steinem, G. 1986. If Men Could Menstruate. In: G. Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, NY: NAL.

Reading Freud made me … skeptical about penis envy. The power of giving birth makes “womb envy” more logical, and an organ as external and unprotected as the penis makes men very vulnerable indeed.
Whatever a “superior” group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an “inferior” group has will be used to justify its plight. Black men were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be “stronger” than white men, while all women were relegated to poorly paid jobs because they were said to be “weaker”. … Logic has nothing to do with oppression.
So what would happen if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? Clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how much. Young boys would talk about it as the envied beginning of manhood. Gifts, religious ceremonies, family dinners, and stag parties would mark the day.
Statistical surveys would show that men did better in sports and won more Olympic medals during their periods. Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation (“men-struation”) as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat (“You have to give blood to take blood”), occupy high political office (“Can women be properly fierce without a monthly cycle governed by the planet Mars?”), be priests, ministers, God Himself (“He gave this blood for our sins”), or rabbis (“Without a monthly purge of impurities, women are unclean”).
Street guys would invent slang (“He’s a three-pad man”) and ‘give fives’ on the corner with some exchange like, “Man you lookin’ good!” “Yeah, man, I’m on the rag!”
In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician.

Vlogbrothers, 2012. Human Sexuality is Complicated…. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=xXAoG8vAyzI [Accessed 30 May. 2014].

it’s nice to imagine that humans are simple, and that you can know a person’s sex and then you will know all sorts of things about them deeply and clearly. And if you don’t fit in this nice little box, people who do can get really confused, and sometimes even angry. And if you yourself don’t fit into one of these nice little boxes and you think that people should, then you end up hating yourself and that’s probably even worse. I think the best and maybe only way to solve this problem is for people to understand that there are no nice, shiny boxes! Or if there are shiny boxes, there are infinite number of them, enough to put all of the people who currently exist, have ever existed, and will ever exist.
But what’s really important is that we trust ourselves, we understand ourselves, we love and respect ourselves, and we grant that same understanding and respect to the people around us. Because when the world becomes one of the infinite continuums and those false dichotomies breakdown and those two shiny boxes break apart in the 7 billion shiny boxes, it’s actually pretty beautiful.

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