Birth and Natality in Feminist Philosophy

Being Born ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 25-54
Author(s):  
Alison Stone
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Maternal Body ◽  
Psychological Difficulties

This chapter sets out the views on birth and being born of Irigaray, Cavarero, and Jantzen. Irigaray’s feminism of sexual difference and her attention to the maternal body lead her to consider birth. She argues that we have psychological difficulties around birth, difficulties that have found expression in canonical works of philosophy. For Irigaray, these expressions help us to piece together what is in fact involved in being born, and to remember our debts to the mothers from whom we are born. The chapter also looks at Cavarero’s understanding of natality, which is informed by Arendt as well as Irigaray, and at how Irigaray, Cavarero, and Jantzen criticize Western culture for being preoccupied with death and mortality while neglecting birth and natality.

Tracing Sexual Difference

1998 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Pamela Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The Difference

A reading of Luce Irigaray suggests the possibility of tracing sexual difference in philosophical accounts of personal identity. In particular, I argue that Irigaray raises the possibility of moving beyond the aporia of the other which lies at the heart of Paul Ricoeur's account of self-identity. My contention is that the self conceived in Ricoeur's Oneself as Another is male insofar as it is dependent upon the patriarchal monotheism which has shaped Western culture both socially and economically. Nevertheless there remains the possibility of developing Ricoeur's reference to 'the trace of the Other' in order to give a non-essential meaning to sexual difference. Such meaning will emerge when (i) both men and women have identities as subjects, and (ii) the difference between them can be expressed. I aim to elucidate both conditions by appropriating Irigaray's 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love.'

Matrix

2011 ◽  
pp. 882-884
Author(s):  
Irina Aristarkhova
Keyword(s):  
Information Technologies ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Maternal Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
And Gender ◽  
As If

1. Matrix = Womb. 2. The Matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us, here, even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth ... that you, like everyone else, was born into bondage ... kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste or touch. A prison for your mind. A Matrix. (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999) 3. What is Matrix? Simply ... the “big Other,” the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. (S. Zizek, 1999) What is Matrix? In the past years, the notion of the Matrix has become dominant in figurations of cyberspace. It seems as if it is the most desirable, the most contemporary and fitting equation; however, its gendered etymology is rarely obvious. On the opposite, the gender of the matrix as a notion and term has been systematically negated in such disciplines as mathematics, engineering, film studies or psychoanalysis. It is necessary thus to explore and critique the Matrix as a most “fitting” metaphor in/for cyberspace that has conceived it (cyberspace) as a free and seamless space very much like the maternal body (Aristarkhova, 2002). The challenge today, therefore, is to reintroduce the maternal as one of embodied encounters with difference, to recover the sexual difference and gender in the notion of matrix with reference to cyberspace and information technologies that support it.

Asymmetrical Genders: Phenomenological Reflections on Sexual Difference

Hypatia ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Stoller
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Positive Account ◽  
Gender Asymmetry

One of the most fundamental premises of feminist philosophy is the assumption of an invidious asymmetry between the genders that has to be overcome. Parallel to this negative account of asymmetry we also find a positive account, developed in particular within the context of so-called feminist philosophies of difference. I explore both notions of gender asymmetry. The goal is a clarification of the notion of asymmetry as it can presently be found in feminist philosophy. Drawing upon phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Levinas) as well as feminist difference theory (Irigaray), I argue that a gender asymmetry does exist that cannot—as in the first assumption—be transformed into symmetry.

Sexual Difference and Decolonization: Oyĕwùmí and Irigaray in Dialogue about Western Culture

Hypatia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Azille Coetzee ◽  
Annemie Halsema
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Gender And Race ◽  
Feminist Scholar ◽  
Gender System

In this article we aim to show the potential of cross‐continental dialogues for a decolonizing feminism. We relate the work of one of the major critics of the Western metaphysical patriarchal order, Luce Irigaray, to the critique of the colonial/modern gender system by the Nigerian feminist scholar Oyĕrónké Oyĕwùmí. Oyĕwùmí's work is often rejected based on the argument that it is empirically wrong. We start by problematizing this line of thinking by providing an epistemological interpretation of Oyĕwùmí's claims. We then draw Irigaray and Oyĕwùmí into conversation, and show how this bolsters and helps to further illuminate and contextualize Oyĕwùmí's critique of gender. But the dialogue between these thinkers also reveals significant limitations of Irigaray's philosophy, namely her presumption of the priority of sexual difference, its rigid duality, and her failure to take into account the inextricable intertwinement of gender and race in the Western patriarchal order. Relating Irigaray's critique of Western culture's forgetting of sexual difference to Oyĕwùmí's critique hence demonstrates to what extent Irigaray's philosophy remains typically Western and how she therefore fails to escape the paradigm that she is so critical of.

Unthinkable concepts, invisible genealogies: rereading the new materialist rereading of The Second Sex

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-500
Author(s):  
Katja Čičigoj
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Ethical Commitment ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Materialist Feminist

In the essay ‘Sexual Differing’ from their book New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin develop their new materialist take on sexual difference through their rereading of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I propose to read this essay as deploying the ‘analytical tool’ of ‘jumping generations’ articulated in the homonymous paper by van der Tuin as signature of the ‘new materialist’ ‘third wave’ of feminist theory. By pointing to the immediate textual context of the passages from The Second Sex quoted in ‘Sexual Differing’, to the philosophical underpinning of Beauvoir's work, and to the historical context of its reception, I argue that while the tool of ‘jumping generations’, as put to use in ‘Sexual Differing’, might produce unexpected outcomes, it also risks confining to dusty feminist archives segments of feminist philosophy that might still be relevant for thinking gendered oppression and liberation today: Beauvoir's understanding of the social ontogenesis of freedom, the collective and egalitarian nature of political transformation and the genealogy of materialist feminist thought theoretically and historically linked to Beauvoir and The Second Sex. The issue is not merely one of historical and theoretical accuracy, but of enabling a capacious materialist analysis of gendered oppression and liberation. I conclude by pointing at how Dolphijn and van der Tuin's approach expressly discards understandings of history and scholarship that it nevertheless necessarily performs, and propose that this can be taken as a starting point to rethink sexual differing in terms of a political and ethical commitment beyond its originary metaphysical new materialist articulation. This is where, I propose, the above-mentioned conceptual resources linked to The Second Sex and muted by ‘Sexual Differing’ could prove fruitful, and timely.

scholarly journals Between Bodies and Pleasures: A Territory Without a Domain

2013 ◽  
pp. 148-163
Author(s):  
Laura Hengehold
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Minorities ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Judgment ◽  
Biological Medicine

Foucault’s debt to Kant is usually examined with respect to his ethos of critique. In fact, Kant’s writings on aesthetic judgment, teleological judgment, and anthropology constitute an important, if implicit, object of Foucault’s genealogical efforts to free Western culture from a scientia sexualis that oppresses sexual minorities. Comparing Foucault’s use of Kant to the use made by psychoanalytic theorists of sexual difference, this paper argues that the concept of non-teleological pleasure found in Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgment may provide grounds for queer thinkers to resist and reconfigure associations between death, knowledge, and sexuality as a function of organisms—associations inherited from the post-Kantian philosophical anthropology and biological medicine of the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Taking Sides on Severed Heads: Kristeva at the Louvre

Text Matters ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 173-183
Author(s):  
Alison Jasper
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Maternal Body ◽  
Making Sense

The theorist and philosopher Julia Kristeva is invited to curate an exhibition at the Louvre in Paris as part of a series-Parti Pris (Taking Sides)- and to turn this into a book, The Severed Head: Capital Visions. The organiser, Régis Michel, wants something partisan, that will challenge people to think, and Kristeva delivers in response a collection of severed heads neatly summarising her critique of the whole of western culture! Three figures dominate, providing a key to making sense of the exhibition: Freud, Bataille, and the maternal body. Using these figures, familiar from across the breadth of her work over the last half a century, she produces a witty analysis of western culture’s persistent privileging of disembodied masculine rationality; the head, ironically phallic, ironically and yet necessarily severed; the maternal body continually arousing a “jubilant anxiety” (Kristeva, Severed Head 34), expressed through violence. Points of critique are raised in relation to Kristeva’s normative tendencies-could we not tell a different story about women, for example? The cultural context of the exhibition is also addressed: who are the intended viewers/readers and whose interests are being served here? Ultimately, however, this is a celebration of Kristeva’s tribute to psychic survivors.

Deleuze and Guattari's Absent Analysis of Patriarchy

Hypatia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 348-368
Author(s):  
Edward Thornton
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Abstract Machine ◽  
Technical Vocabulary ◽  
Political Expediency

Feminist philosophy has offered mixed opinions on the collaborative projects of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But although there has been much discussion of the political expediency of what Deleuze and Guattari do say about sexual difference, this article will outline what is absent from Anti‐Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (the two volumes comprising Capitalism and Schizophrenia). Specifically, I will argue that though Deleuze and Guattari offer a historical account of a range of power structures—most notably capitalism, but also despotism, fascism, and authoritarianism—they give no such account of the development of patriarchy. Secondarily, this article will argue that Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of contemporary power relations could be improved by adding an accompanying analysis of the institution of patriarchy. After offering a detailed account of the technical vocabulary used by Deleuze and Guattari for the analysis of political institutions, I will argue that what their work requires is an account of how patriarchy is historically produced by an “abstract machine” of masculinity. This article will finish with some suggestions for the way that such an account could be given via an analysis of the abstract machine of phallusization.

A Revised Irigarayan Study of the Hierarchy of Form and Matter, This Time without Sexual Difference

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-101
Author(s):  
Emily Anne Parker
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Luce Irigaray

Chapter 1 discusses the work of Luce Irigaray, whose philosophy of sexual difference is almost the needed exposition of the polis. The discussion in this chapter attempts to learn from the work of Luce Irigaray without endorsing her philosophy of sexual difference. For Irigaray, no human invented the fact that human bodies are not all alike and cannot share a generic morphology. This chapter seeks to rewrite this claim in terms of elemental difference, as opposed to sexual or sexuate difference. The denial of the elementality of difference anchors a divide between concepts of form and matter, polis and its matter, oikos, and thus anchors matter’s politics, the relationalities that flow from assumption of these concepts. The denial of elemental difference also anchors a divide between two gestures closely related to these: the body and bodies. This chapter offers a new way to practice feminist philosophy, as skepticism toward the body, rather than as advocacy of those of “one’s own sex.”

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