I've changed the syllabus a bit, since we're running short on time. We'll talk
about Irigaray's "This Sex Which Is Not One," but we'll skip her other article,
"Commodities Amongst Themselves." You won't be responsible for this article
on any worksheet or any exam.
Luce Irigaray, like Helene Cixous, follows the thinking of poststructuralist
theorists in asking questions about the relationship between language and bodies,
specifically male and female bodies and masculine and feminine language. Like
Cixous, she focuses on the female body and how it has been constructed in phallogocentric
systems like Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Irigaray, however, discusses
the question of a female or feminine sexuality in more depth than Cixous;
she wants specifically to explore the question of a feminine jouissance
and what that might be when defined on its own terms.
"Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine
parameters," declares Irigaray in her first sentence. She's following Freud
here, who defined all active erotic behavior as masculine, and all passive behavior
as feminine; he also labeled clitoral sexual pleasure (as in masturbation) as
active/masculine, and vaginal sexual pleasure as passive/feminine. Freud also
declared that the clitoris was literally a "little penis," insofar as it gave
a female a masculine/phallic pleasure. Irigaray points out that, using Freud's
definitions, female sex organs and eroticism are defined only in terms of male
sex organs and eroticism. If the female sex organ is the clitoris, it's a little
penis, hence an inferior one, something smaller than and less powerful than
the male version. If the female sex organ is the vagina, then it is passive,
waiting to be filled with a penis in order to experience pleasure, rather than
seeking pleasure itself, actively. Rather, vaginal female sexuality is oriented
toward finding a penis--in a father/husband, in a baby, or in masculine social
roles.
Note the "if"s in the above statements: if the female sex organ is the clitoris,
and if the female sex organ is the vagina. This is the central problem in psychoanalytic
theory, and in Western cultural thought, according to Irigaray: we can't figure
out how to talk about female sexuality and female bodily configurations. Is
there "a female sex organ"? If so, what is it? Is there a single word, a way
to represent as unified, the locus of female sexuality? If not, how do we talk
about it, represent it in language? Another way to think about this is in terms
of binary oppositions: if the valued term is "penis," then what's on the other
side of the slash?
Irigaray states that Freud has "nothing to say" about woman and her pleasure--"nothing"
because Freudian psychoanalysis defines female pleasure solely in terms of male
bodies (i.e. as oriented toward a penis) and "nothing" because Freud defines
the female genitalia as "nothing"-- the opposite of penis, in this equation,
being "nothing," since girls have supposedly already been castrated. All concepts
of female sexual pleasure within Freudian psychoanalysis, Irigaray argues, are
"foreign to" female pleasure stemming from the female body itself.
Female sexual pleasure, or jouissance, is of a different order, in
a different economy than male sexual pleasure, according to Irigaray, based
on the different configurations of female and male bodies. Man must have an
instrument with which to touch himself, she argues; if his pleasure is indeed
based in the penis, then something else--a hand, a vagina, language--has to
touch the penis in order to produce pleasure. Woman, however, touches herself
all the time-- the structure of the female genitals provides constant autoerotic
contact, as "at least two" lips are always pressing against each other and providing
pleasure.
From this, Irigaray posits heterosexual intercourse as a "violation," an interruption
of female autoerotic pleasure in order to place female sexuality back within
a phallic system, a system based on the pleasure of a penis, rather than of
the female body. She calls this a form of "rape," naming heterosexual intercourse
as "foreign to the feminine." This might be a place to take issue with Irigaray's
own limited construction of male and female sexuality.
Irigaray goes on to talk about what constitutes male desire, or male sexuality.
She links the desire for intercourse, for vaginal penetration by the penis,
to the desire to return to a union with the mother's body--what was forbidden
in both Freud and Lacan's view of human development. In intercourse, then, the
female partner's body is only a "prop" for a male fantasy of reunion and remerging.
The female partner's desire--which, presumably, is the same as the male partner's
desire, that is, to return to and remerge with the maternal body--isn't pursued
in heterosexual intercourse; the woman can't fantasize a joining with the maternal
body, since she's joining with a male body, while the man can have that fantasy
in joining with a female body. In fact, Irigaray argues, the man's pursuit of
his desire (for union with the maternal body) actively interrupts the woman's
communion with her own female body, with the genital lips constantly touching
each other.
Irigaray concludes, from this, that female desire, or feminine desire, defined
in its own terms, and not in relation to masculine desire or male bodies, is
like a "lost civilization," one which has a "different alphabet" and a "different
language." This lost desire/language was "submerged by the logic which has dominated
the West since the Greeks." The Western cultural "logic" which Irigaray says
shapes our notions of male and female bodies and desires comes from Western
philosophy's preference for presence over absence, and for things that are visible
over things that are invisible. Western philosophies privilege things that are
visible and things that have a definite traceable/nameable shape or form, Irigaray
points out; both of these preferences subsume or erase the "lost civilization"
that is feminine desire.
Irigaray again invokes Freud and Lacan to claim that female sexual pleasure is based in touch, not in sight. According to Freud, woman has "nothing to see"-- no penis, no distinct nameable form to her genital configuration. According to Lacan as well as Freud, the first human experience of sexual/erotic pleasure comes from touch, from physical contact with the caregiver's body, which they presume to be a female body. In Freud's paradigm, girls represss/renounce this original eroticism of touch in order to become heterosexual; boys just defer that eroticism, renouncing their claim on their mother's body in favor of getting to touch another female body some day. In Lacan's version, the Real--associated with the prelinguistic, with touch, and with the maternal body--is what must be left behind in order to enter into the Symbolic Order, into language; for Lacan, the Imaginary is the stage where the child shifts its primary mode of perception from touch, from tactility, to vision, to looking and seeing, to a "scopic economy."
The construction of the illusion of "self" through internalizing a notion of
"other" in the Mirror Stage comes solely through the child SEEING its image
in the mirror; the concept of "otherness" is possible only when vision is the
primary sense, since the sense of touch does not allow for distance or "otherness."
Hence for Lacan all "I"dentity is a visually-based illusion. For both Freud
and Lacan, the desire to return to touch, to touch the maternal body, is what
is forbidden in their notions of adulthood; the original erotic connection to
a female body through touch is banned, banished to the unconscious, and unrepresentable
in language.
In this register or economy of sight, where vision is more important than touch,
where having something to see is more important than nothing/invisibility, the
female body is classified as "nothing to see"-- in fact, it's a horrible sight,
since the "nothing" of the female genitals shows the fact of the female's castration,
hence the possibility for the male of lacking a penis, of being himself castrated.
The sight of this absence, this lack, is disturbing to a phallic economy which
privileges sight and presence--so disturbing, according to Irigaray, that the
female genitals are excluded from representation.
Since the female genitals are "nothing to see," Irigaray continues, they also
have no definite form. Western culture privileges things that are "phallomorphic,"
that is, shaped like a penis, especially in the idea of wanting things to have
a definite shape and to be unitary, to be one. Within the system of Western
cultural binary oppositions, "one" is favored over "zero" or "more than one,"
so "penis" (and things shaped like penises) are favored over things with less
determinate shapes.
In Freud and Lacan, the male genitals are defined as ONE, as the penis or phallus,
ignoring all other aspects of male genitalia and male erotogenic zones. The
female genitals are "NOT ONE," which raises the question: what are they? The
names we come up with--clitoris, vagina, labia majora, labia minora, and whatever
else might be there--do not name a single organ, nor even two distinct organs.
There is no proper single name for the female genitals; in terms of a binary
opposition, the opposite of "penis" is--- what?? Thus the female body, or more
specifically the female genitals, are inherently "deconstructive," because they
disturb the stability of the binary oppositions that structure Western (phallogocentric)
thought.
Irigaray says that the female body experiences sexual pleasure EVERYWHERE;
the genitals which are not one or two but multiple are not the sole locus of
pleasure for woman. She implies that man might be limited by the focus on the
penis or the genitals as the only source of sexual pleasure (or the only correct
non-incestuous reproductive heterosexual source); what if sexual pleasure for
both sexes wasn't limited to reproductive heterosexuality, to the genitals,
or to a unitary definition of what constitutes erotogenic zones?
Irigaray leaves us to think about that on our own, and moves on to discuss
the idea of a female or feminine LANGUAGE. She follows Cixous and Lacan in basing
this conception of a feminine language on the multiplicity of the female body.
The female body can speak from everywhere, according to Irigaray, just as the
female body can experience sexual pleasure everywhere. And, like Cixous, she
imagines that female/feminine language is something unfixed, slippery, not making
sense, not anchored firmly within the phallogocentric Symbolic Order.
Irigaray ends this article with a discussion of woman as "use value" for man, as a commodity for exchange, as part of a phallic "economy." We'll be able to understand these ideas better next week, when we start talking about Marxist theories.
All materials on this site were written by, and remain the property of, Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor of English, University of Colorado at Boulder. You are welcome to quote from this lecture, or link to your own website, with proper citation and attribution: http://www.Colorado.EDU/English/engl2010mk/irigaray.lecture.html