From previous work with Irigaray for what it's worth

According to Freud, female sexuality is formed in a mirror reverse of the male; she loves the father and then identifies with the mother. The female is already castrated and is therefore envious of the male and compensates for this by having a baby. For Luce Irigaray, this formula for sexuality is unacceptable. In "The Sex Which is Not One," she argues that if this Freudian dynamic holds true, then the female is defined by the absence of the penis and is therefore a lack. The female sex is therefore not a sex (not one) but the absence of a sex whose function is to massage the predominant penis to orgasm in order to regain the phallus-baby.
From this notion of a sex which is not one (meaning not a sex), Irigaray, through a clever linguistic trick, argues that the female is actually two. Because there are two labia, the female is actually two parts that are always touching. The female then can always derive pleasure from herself. Dominant male
sexuality is experienced as a violent intrusion into the sexuality of the female. The societally favored  male erection forces the labia, which because they are touching are in union, apart. Thus the male forces division and separation upon female sexuality. For Irigaray, this phallic sexuality, which Freud and society privilege, is actually a foreign imaginary that co-opts the female into the world of the phallocentric. Woman becomes a stage for the "enactment" of male fantasies. She becomes the object for male desire and sexuality.
Irigaray argues that there must be a time, before the phallogocentric epoch began, when the female desire had a voice. Female desire is founded in a notion of "incompleteness" and is denied by the phallocentric civilization that must give her the phallus-baby. This absence also takes her proper name and leaves her a negative in relation to the phallus' positive.
It is from this negative space that the female derives her relationship to the world. Because she has no embodiment of “proper" positive sexuality (phallus), she is free to explore multiple other alternatives. For Irigaray female sexuality is always at least double, and often plural. Because the female is an absence of the one, she can explore the possibility of the
many. Female desire results from touching, while male sexuality derives from looking. For Irigaray then, the touching of the vulva, the clitoris and the breasts all contribute to the multiplicity that makes up the female imaginary. The female then is absence of the phallus, but possesses many sexual organs.
Freud's notion is that the female is not one (phallus), but none. Irigaray reworks this; the female is not one, she is many.
This multiple sexuality then informs the female psyche. She does not derive from a single fixed point, which is the derivative of male phallocentric logical discourse, but comes from a milieu of many points. Her pleasure and therefore her discourse is derived from the relation of all her different loci. Because of this difference, Irigaray argues male-female
sexual partnership is not possible. In society the male must deny the female her discourse in favor of his own. The female then becomes the playing field for the struggle between competing male discourses. A removal from this structure is not the answer according  to  Irigaray. Instead the female must work to gain
independence from the male so that she can have her own power. This will allow her to maintain her discourse and not depend on the male. Independent, she would therefore be an entity in and of herself, and not in relation to a male.

No comments: