Date: Thu, 5 Oct 1995 12:19:02 +1000 (EST)
From: Catherine Driscoll <s_cad1-AT-eduserv.its.unimelb.EDU.AU>
Subject: Re: This Sex


On Wed, 4 Oct 1995, Judith L. Poxon wrote:

> The binariness of sexual difference, in Irigaray, also raises the 
> question of whether she is heterosexist (a question that kicked around 
> for a while on this list in the spring). Someone has recently raised the 
> question of what the implications of I's thinking of sexual difference 
> are for (male) homosexual desire, and I'd like to add that I wonder about 
> the implications for lesbian desire, as well. Immediately after the 
> passage from "This Sex..." that Rita cited above, there is an interesting 
> bit that sounds as if she reads intercourse as rape:
> 
>      "This autoeroticism [of woman] is disrupted by a violent break-in: 
>      the brutal separation of the two lips by a violating penis, an 
>      intrusion that distracts and deflects the woman from this 
>      `self-caressing' she needs if she is not to incur the disappearance 
>      of her own pleasure in sexual relations" (p. 24).
> 
> And in fact, when Irigaray was first translated I remember that many read
> her as (lesbian) separatist. In her more recent work, however, she has
> advanced a model of a (divinized) heterosexual couple as paradigmatic of 
> ethicality, which is a claim I find very problematic. So an important 
> question for me is: Does Irigaray's positing of "woman" as irreducibly 
> multiple in her sexuality (and in her yet-to-be-articulated discourse?) 
> *sufficiently* disrupt the dialectical structure she still invokes with 
> her emphasis on (hetero)sexual difference?
> 


You might read AnnaMarie Jagose's _Lesbian Utopics_ (Routledge 1994) 
which has a chapter arguing against Irigaray's speculations on the 
lesbian which is very intelligent even if I substantially disagress with 
it.  Jagose's position, completely counter to Grosz's chapter in 
_Engaging with Irigaray_, is that Irigaray posits the lesbian as stage 
through which women must pass in order to accede to a full mysterious 
heterosexuality.  My disagreement focuses on whether Irigaray has in fact 
any program for the sexual destiny of women -- whether her work can be at 
all conceived in such linear (teleological) terms.  

Catherine Driscoll 

     ------------------