The famous militant feminist slogan from the 1970s, “the future is female,” experienced a resurgence recently following signs of the rolling back of important rights gained during international women’s movements like those won in Roe v. Wade. The phrase originated in a feminist bookstore in New York City and suggests that in the future women will enjoy emancipation and political power equal to or greater than that of men. It also harbors a low-key critique of the present. If the future is female, is the present male? People wondered then and they wonder now whether gaining emancipation from patriarchy necessarily means reshuffling the deck of power in favor of another side.
Certainly, many agree patriarchy has run its course. Less clear is how further emancipation can come about or what it will look like when it does. Women’s separatist movements like those of the 1970s held that women could gain emancipation through isolation from men. Many more moderate feminists disagreed with this radical feminist position. Equality feminists continued in the same vein as the suffragists, arguing that legal and political equality are the rational goals of feminism, and that demanding otherwise amounts to a reconfirmation of the imbalance between women and men thought to have originally caused women’s oppression. They worried that emphasizing differences violates the principles of the best hope for women’s liberation: equal treatment.
Yet another set of feminists disagreed with both these positions. Difference feminists held that not only was it unrealistic and damaging to expect women to conform to expectations created by and for men, such expectations increased women’s oppression by insisting that they conform to masculine ideals unsuited to their particular strengths. The narrative of difference feminism was sometimes told by religious feminists, called new feminists, who expounded an affirmation of different roles for the sexes suggesting that neither is completely independent from the other, and cannot reach their full potential without the participation of the other. Edith Stein, a student of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, is known for espousing this view, called complementarianism. Complementarians opine that there is a specifically “feminine genius,” an inherent skill for caring, creativity, and birth-giving, even if this does not only mean literal motherhood. New feminism has been criticized for placing unnecessary restrictions on women based on roles created by patriarchal structures that play directly into maintaining existing sexual hierarchies.
If radical feminism and separatism maintain that patriarchy ought to be counteracted by rebalancing power away from men, then difference feminism advocates valuing women and men not only for their similarities, but also for their respective differences, ending power struggles between sexes. Were difference feminism to create a slogan, it would be, “the future is female and male.”
Irigaray’s Philosophy of Sexual Difference
An important singular provocative voice defended difference yet criticized difference feminism’s thesis that women and men are partial and need the other for fulfillment. Belgian-born French feminist Luce Irigaray wrote her now classic Speculum of the Other Woman in 1974, whose publication proved a watershed for not only a different kind of difference feminism, one that foresaw more flexibility in the identity and relation of sexes, but a new philosophy based on difference beginning with sexual difference. With her other books, like An Ethics of Sexual Difference and This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray articulated a view of the sexes as supplements rather than complements, meaning each sex for Irigaray stands autonomously in a potentially reciprocal but not incomplete relation to another sex.
She presented views that subvert most conventional perspectives: she is positive about the interactions between women and men, including the possibility of marriage, heterosexuality, and parenthood, but advocates women’s emancipation from any and all restrictions patriarchy imposes, including of profession, activity, finances, and sexuality. She advocates women’s necessary leadership in philosophy and politics. This is a stance that the new feminists would reject since they argue for the protection of women from public arenas. She advocates women’s independence from men, in certain ways agreeing with radical feminists’ advocacy for autonomy, women’s sexual and reproductive rights, and even partial separation. But she rejects the idea that women should give up on relations with men, arguing that the difference between men and women provides an unparalleled site for encounters with difference.
Moreover, Irigaray articulated a specifically feminist and liberatory angle to the valorization of difference: the liberation of humanity in general entails thematizing and promoting not only the equality of women, but also the liberation of sexes, including creating conditions for constructive relations between sexes at the individual and macro-political levels. Unlike some feminists, Irigaray doesn’t view patriarchy as co-original with human culture, but rather arising as a contingent part of history in particular times and places, for instance, ancient Greece. She argues that the liberation of women is necessary to the global liberation of human beings not only because freeing women is important, but also because the relations between men and women (and humankind more generally) cannot freely develop when women are oppressed. Thus, women’s oppression deprives not only women but all human beings of their full freedom and development.
Irigaray’s Understanding of Sexuate Subjectivity
Irigaray sees sex identity neither through the lens of the sex roles nor through psychology but rather through a third category of what she defines as “subjectivity,” a combination of intra- and inter-subjective relations that intersect for/as the subject. Subjectivity is the evolving relation between biological, psychological, social, but especially relational aspects of identity—both the relation from self to self (self-affection) and the relation of self to other (hetero-affection). She opposes the neutralization of subjectivity, arguing that while it is not desirable or possible to essentialize gender, gender/sex identity (what she terms “sexuate subjectivity”) is essential to what it is to be human.
Departing from radical feminism, Irigaray rejects the idea that heterosexuality is inherently oppressive. She emphasizes what she sees as positive aspects of what she has termed “hetero-sexual” relations stemming from the communication of differences that arise in relationships between sexes. Critics, such as Judith Butler and Alison Stone, worry that this amounts to heterosexism within her theory, or at least reinforces compulsory heterosexuality, and may undermine efforts such as political lesbianism, separatism, or movements for queer liberation, to dismantle patriarchal power. Irigaray, for her part, argues that patriarchy is perpetuated not by the sheer existence of relations between the sexes, but by the neutralization of sex which conceals domination by men. Moreover, she holds that true dialogue and partnership between sexes would be anti-patriarchal insofar as patriarchy traditionally emphasizes the singularity and non-relationality of subjectivity and de-emphasizes subject–subject relations, especially non-oppressive relations between sexes.
While Irigaray acknowledges that heterosexual practices can and do perpetuate hierarchy between sexes when operating within the logic of patriarchy, she argues for the necessity of horizontal relations between sexes to the dismantling of patriarchal power. Sharing in common with political lesbianism and separatism the view that women should become independent from male domination, Irigaray differs by arguing that women should not only be able to be independent, but also able to meet the other, especially the sexually different other, without being subjugated or subordinated to them psychologically, socially, politically, or economically. Meeting the sexually different other entails both independence from them and openness to them, a balance that goes against patriarchy that promotes the logic of dominance and subordination (and thus dependence and opposition) as opposed to horizontal relations promoting community with another/others and individuation.
While some, including Butler, have argued that Irigaray’s positive view of heterosexuality marginalizes LGBTQ+ persons, Irigaray has countered this criticism by maintaining that she does not mean to articulate a preference for one sexuality, but for the liberatory and political potential of subjective relations of all sorts, of which inter-sexual relations make up only one kind. She chooses to emphasize inter-sexual relations, especially noting the use of the Greek root “heteros” having to do with emphasizing differences among human beings, yet these relations include those between and among women. Notably, Irigaray has also criticized heterosexual relations within patriarchy, for example arguing in This Sex Which Is Not One, that heterosexuality as practiced within patriarchy is really “hommosexuality,” commerce among men, employing a play on the French word for man: “homme.”
Irigaray and the Critique of Sexual Categorization
Some, for instance Lisa Guenther, Butler, and Stone, have also worried that Irigaray’s thematizing of gender identity tends to exclude those who do not conform to traditional concepts of man or woman, ranging from excluding masculine women (echoing the essentialism accusation), feminine men, as well as trans, non-binary, intersex, and other gender non-conforming persons. Irigaray has not commented extensively on marginalized gender identities, but maintains that her commitment to sexual difference is not exclusive to any particular gender identification and applies to all humankind. This may be unsatisfying when regarded from the point of view that liberation from cis-sexism (discrimination against, marginalization and oppression of non-cis persons—for instance, trans and non-binary persons) demands explicit inclusion of marginalized identities and opposition to cis-normativity. Yet it is important to recognize that Irigaray in principle means to include all genders in the ethos of sexual difference and doesn’t reject sexual multimorphism. She does not assert that women, men, or others must conform to their medically or socially assigned biological sex identity, only that biological sex plays an integral role among other factors in the background of sexuate subjectivity. She does not specify sexuate subjectivity as conforming to what Talia Mae Bettcher calls “moral sex,” the expectation people have of what the body should be of someone who presents as a certain gender. I have argued sexuate subjectivity is flexible enough to include non-conforming identities since it emphasizes the formation of identity rather than specific biological or socially determined categories of identity.
In part, Irigaray resists traditional sex categories by defining a different way of making sex identities intelligible: that of sexuate subjectivity, which is different than sex. This goes against the theory that sex identity is socialization, specifically socialization that enforces the subordination and psychological submissiveness of female subjects. Irigaray does not subscribe to the feminine essence philosophy, not agreeing that women have an inborn feminine essence. Rather, she adheres to the perspective that women develop their subjectivity based on a combination of their morphology, that is the shape and function of their anatomy, and the symbols and language associated with it, as well as relations and interactions with others both individually and with a broader culture. Thus, gender identity and one’s sense of gender subjectivity are contextualized by the surrounding society and by anatomy; however, she theorizes both of these in more phenomenological (or generally philosophical) rather than deterministic ways. No single factor or set of factors can condition sexuate identity outright, according to Irigaray’s theory. Instead, these factors form a background out of which subjects form their own autonomous identity.
Irigaray does not favor the abolition of gender and maintains instead that denying sexuation and especially sexual difference is counter to the intelligibility of human subjectivity. She claims, moreover, that humans are sexuately realized subjects. To abolish gender/sex, she argues, would inevitably result in a neutralization of difference. And, she contends, it would eliminate a crucially important mode of understanding encounters with radically different others through sexuation, as well as of making sense of one’s own individuation. For Irigaray, subjectivity itself implies differentiation, a differentiation she argues arises in large part on the basis of sexuation.
Irigaray’s Feminism Now
Irigaray’s sexual difference feminism offers a radical contribution that subverts expectations of conformism in difference feminism and at the same time overcomes limitations associated with equality feminism. She insists on dismantling masculine standards for all, and advocates for cultivating different values not conforming to the tradition. Her critiques are radical, but do not fall into the tropes of radical feminism that sometimes become unnecessarily pessimistic.
Critics and supporters alike still debate many of Irigaray’s most well-known arguments due to their complexity and her radical revisions of the Western tradition. Irigaray’s philosophy has undergone substantial development over the decades since Speculum of the Other Woman, with some of her most recent books—such as To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being (2017), Sharing the Fire: Outline of a Dialectics of Sensitivity (2019), Towards a New Human Being (2019), and Challenging a Fictitious Neutrality: Heidegger in Question (2022)—offering robust visions of a harmonious human future. In order to appreciate her nuanced positions, Irigaray is best viewed through the lens of her radicality as a thinker and by taking into consideration her project as a whole. The rigorousness of her critique of patriarchy and the sensitivity of her proposals to rebuild in its place proffer the strongest evidence of the viability of her unique interventions in feminism.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Associate Editor Alida Liberman.
Jennifer Carter
Jennifer Carter is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Stony Brook University in New York. Her recent publications include "On Peaceful Political Relations Between Two in Luce Irigaray’s Work," and chapters in What is Sexual Difference and Towards a New Human Being. She is writing a monograph on Irigaray’s philosophy of touch, editing a collected volume on feminist approaches to touch, and working on a project on phenomenology and quantum mechanics.
