Luce Irigaray
from book of the same title
Reprinted in A Render in Feminist Knowledge,
(ed.) Sneja Gunew. Routledge, 1991
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Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters. Thus the opposition between 'masculine' clitoral activity and 'feminine' vaginal passivity, an opposition which Freud -- and many others -- saw as stages, or alternatives, in the development of a sexually 'normal' woman, seems rather too clearly required by the practice of male sexuality. For the clitoris is conceived as a little penis pleasant to masturbate so long as castration anxiety does not exist (for the boy child), and the vagina is valued for the 'lodging' it offers the male organ when the forbidden hand has to find a replacement for pleasure-giving.
In these terms, woman's erogenous zones never amount to anything but a clitoris-sex that is not comparable to the noble phallic organ, or a hole-envelope that serves to sheath and massage the penis in intercourse: an non-sex, or a masculine organ turned back upon itself, self-embracing.
About woman and her pleasure, this view of the sexual relation has nothing to say. Her lot is that of 'lack', 'atrophy' (of the sexual organ) and 'penis envy', the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value. Thus she attempts by every means available to appropriate that organ for herself: through her somewhat servile love of the father-husband capable of giving her one, through her desire for a child-penis, preferably a boy, through access to the cultural values still reserved by right to males alone and therfore always masculine, and so on. Woman lives her own desire only as the expectation that she may at last come to possess an equivalent of the male organ.
Yet all this appears quite foreign to her own pleasure, unless it remains within the dominant phallic economy. Thus, for example, woman's auto-eroticism is very different from man's. In order to touch himself, man needs an instrument; his hand, a woman's body, language. . . . And this self-caressing requires at least a minimum of activity. As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman 'touches herself' all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two -- but not divisible into one(s) -- that caress each other.
This auto-eroticism 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. If the vagina to to serve also, but not only, to take over for the little boy's hand in order to assure an articulation between auto-eroticism and hetero-eroticism in intercourse (the encounter with the totally other always signifying death), how, in the classic representation of sexuality, can the perpetuation of auto-eroticism for woman to be managed? Will woman not be left with the impossible alternative between a defensive virginity, fiercely turned in upon itself, and a body open to penetration that no longer knows, in this 'hole' that constitutes its sex, the pleasure of its own touch? The more or less exclusive -- and highly anxious -- attention paid to erection in western sexuality proves to what extent the imaginary that governs it is foreign to the feminine. For the most part, this sexuality offers nothing but imperatives dictated by male rivalry : the 'strongest' being the one who has the best 'hard-on', the longest, the biggest, the stiffest penis, or even the one who 'pees the furthest' (as in little boys' contest). Or else one finds imperatives dictated by the enactment of sado-masochistic fantasies, these in turn governed by man's relation to his mother: the desire to force entry, to penerate, to appropriate for himself the mystery of this womb where he has been conceived, the secret of his begetting, of his 'origin'. Desire/need, also to make blood flow again in order to revive a very old relationship -- intra-uterine, to be sure, but also pre-historic -- to the maternal.
Woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man's fantasies. That she may find pleasure there in that role, by proxy, is possible, even certain. But such pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own, and it leaves her in a familiar state of dependency upon man. 戚澗 is particularly foreign to female eroticism. Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking, and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: She is to be the beautiful object of contemplation. While her body finds itself thus eroticized, and called to a double movement of exhibition and of chaste retreat in order to stimulate the drives of the 'subject', her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see.
And if woman takes pleasure precisely from this incompleteness of form, which allows her organ to touch itself over and over again, indefinitely, by itself, that pleasure (ie. from auto-eroticism) is denied by a civilization that privileges phallomorphism (morphism: an element forming abstract nouns denoting the state of having a specified form). The value granted to the only definable form excludes the one that is in play in female auto-eroticism.
The multiplicity of female desire and female language:
The female imaginary, the repressed entity: Female sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural. Woman's pleasure does not have to choose between clitoral activity and vaginal passivity, for example. They each contribute, irreplaceably, to woman's pleasure. Pleasures which are somewhat misunderstood in sexual difference as it is imagined -- or nor imagined, the other sex being only the indispensable complement to the only sex.
But woman has sex organ more or less everywhere. She finds pleasure almost everywhere.
'She' is indefinitely other in herself. This is doubtless why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious ... not to mention her language, in which 'she' sets off in all directions leaving 'him' unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand. For in what she says, too, at lease when she dares, woman is constantly touching herself. For if 'she' says something, it is not, it is already no longer, identical with what she means. What she says is never identical with anything, moreover; rather, it is contiguous. It touches (upon). And when it strays too far from that proximity, she breaks off and starts over at 'zero': her body-sex.
And if you ask them insistenly what they are thinking about, they can only reply: Nothing. Everything.
Thus what they desire is precisely nothing, and at the same time everything. Always something more and something else besides that one -- sexual organ, for example -- that you give them, attribute to them. Their desire is often interpreted, and feared, as a sort of insatiable hunger, a voracity that will swallow you whole. Whereas it really involves a different economy more than anything else, one that upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-object of a desire, diffuses the polarization of a single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse...
Must this multiplicity of female desire and female language be understood as shards, scattered remnants of a violated sexuality? A sexuality denied? The question has no simple answer. The rejection, the exclusion of a female imaginary certainly puts woman in the position of experiencing herself only fragmentarily, in the little-structured margins of a dominant ideology, as waste, or excess, what is left of a mirror invested by the (masculine) 'subject' to reflect himself, to copy himself. Moreover, the role of 'femininity' is prescribed by this masculine specula(riza)tion and corresponds scarcely at all to woman's desire, which may be recovered only in secret, in hiding, with anxiety and guilt.
(Re)-discovering herself, for a woman, thus could only signify the possibility of sacrificing no one of her pleasures to another, or identifying herself with none of them in particular, of never being simply one.
Woman always remains several, but she is kept from dispersion because the other is already within her and is auto-erotically familiar to her. Which is not to say that she appropriates the other for herself, that she reduces it to her own property. Ownership and property are doubless quite foreign to the feminine. At lease sexually. But not nearness. Nearness so pronounced that it makes all discrimination of identy, and thus all forms of property, impossible. Woman derives pleasure from what is so near that she cannot have it, nor have herself. She herself enters into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either. This puts into question all prevailing economies; their calculations are irremediably stymied by woman's pleasure, as it increases indefinitely from its passage in and through the other.
But if women are to preserve and expand their auto-eroticism, their homo-sexuality?, might not the renunciation of heterosexual pleasure correspond once again to that disconnection from power that is traditionally theirs? Would it not involve a new prison, a new cloister, built of their own accord? For women to undertake tactical strikes, to keep themselves apart from men long enough to defend their desire, especially through speech, to discover the love of other women while sheltered from men's imperious choices that put them in the position of rival commodities, to forge for themselves a social status that compels recognition, to earn their living in order to escape from the condition of prostitute... these are certainly indispensable stages in the escape from their proletarization on the exchange market. But if their aim were simply to reverse the order of things, even supposing this to be possible, history would repeat itself in the long run, would revert to sameness: to phallocratism. It would leave room neither for women's sexuality, nor for women's imaginary, nor for women's language to take (their) place.
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This auto-eroticism 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.
The opposition between 'masculine' clitoral activity and 'feminine' vaginal passivity, an opposition which Freud -- and many others -- saw as stages, or alternatives, in the development of a sexually 'normal' woman, seems rather too clearly required by the practice of male sexuality. For the clitoris is conceived as a little penis. Phallic symbols: 'Penis envy,' the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value. About woman and her pleasure, this view of the sexual relation has nothing to say. Her lot is that of 'lack', 'atrophy' (of the sexual organ) and 'penis envy', the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value. Thus she attempts by every means available to appropriate that organ for herself: through her somewhat servile love of the father-husband capable of giving her one, through her desire for a child-penis, preferably a boy. Woman lives her own desire only as the expectation that she may at last come to possess an equivalent of the male organ.
The sexual imaginary of men: The more or less exclusive -and highly anxious- attention paid to erection in western sexuality proves to what extent the imaginary that governs it is foreign to the feminine. For the most part, this sexuality offers nothing but imperatives dictated by male rivalry:the 'strongest' being the one who has the best 'hard-on', the longest, the biggest, the stiffest penis, or even the one who 'pees the furthest' (as in little boy's contests).
Yet all this appears quite foreign to her own pleasure, unless it remains within the dominant phallic economy. Thus, for example, woman's auto-eroticism is very different from man's. Woman 'touches herself' all the time for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. within herself, she is already two -- but not divisible into one(s) -- that caress each other.
This auto-eroticism 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.
Woman's desire has doubtless been sdubmerged by the logic that has dominated the west since the time of the Greeks.
Within this logic, the predominace of the visual, and of the discrimination and individualization of form is particularly foreign to female eroticism.