8. Psychoanalysis, Post-structuralism and Feminism- Luce Irigaray-"Women on the Market" Flashcards
“Women on the Market”
In this essay, Irigaray tackles the genesis of just this phallogocentric economy, that she sees as a result of the exchange of woman, which in turn is a precondition for the market economy to work in the first place.
Starting from the work of Lévi-Strauss, who claims that the reason that it is women that are exchanged is because they are ”scarce [commodities] … essential to the life of the group,” Irigaray raises the question as to why – ”considering the biological equilibrium between male and female births,” it is women that are exchanged?
For Levi-Strauss, this is because the ”deep polygamous tendency, which exists among all men, always makes the number of available women seem insufficient. Let us add that, even if there were as many women as men, these women would not be equally desirable … and that, by definition…, the most desirable women must form a minority.”
Naturalization reloaded
This, no doubt, is a scandalous assumption, to which Irigaray responds:
”Are men all equally desirable? Do women have no tendency toward polygamy? … A fortiori: why are men not objects of exchange among women?” (799)
Such logic certainly is a fine example of ”naturalization” – or is it?
It is important to address this issue here, since nowhere has the tendency to naturalize phenomena as strong as in the gender debates triggered by feminism.
Sex and Gender
This dichotomy (another one!!!) assumes that, while our biological set up usually defines us as either woman or man, gender roles are cultural constructs more or less independent of our sexes.
To be sexually a woman or man, that is, is one thing. To act according to the role models that have been devised for either one, is to accord to our gender roles.
The question that then arises are: Is the exchange of women (instead of men) a result of our ”natural” (sexual) or cultural – gender – set up (another strained dichotomy)? If it isn’t, could it be otherwise? If it could, why isn’t it? Or why isn’t is more, since there have been matrilinear societies? Does matrilinearity make societies matriarchic?
What does that say about Irigaray’s claim that ”It is because women’s bodies – through their use, consumption, and circulation – provide for the condition making social life and culture possible, although they remain an unknown ’infrastructure’ of the elaboration of that social life and culture” (801)?
The male economy
The question is whether, if men were made part of such an economy (which begs the next question: could they?), would it be them that would disappear? Or is the market per se a ”male” phenomenon? Is the reduction of women to commodities the result of a market – and would the same then apply to men on a market run by women – or of the male definition of a market that would either look otherwise, be run otherwise, or maybe would not even exist?
This is a momentous question, since one goes in the direction of of psychoanalysis and Lacan (the phallic), the other in the direction (Marx), the two approaches she tries to combine.
Marx and/vs. Lacan
It is with the help of Marx that she then explains the dynamic with which the ”use value” of the female body – through its means of reproduction – is turned into its exchange value, and thus women are made practically invisible and divided.
”Participation in society requires that the body submit itself to a specularization, a speculation, that transforms it into a value-bearing object [in the double sense of the term, T.C.], a standardized sign, an exchangeable signifier, a ’likeness’ with reference to an authoritative model. A commodity – a woman – is divided into two irreconcilable ’bodies’: her ’natural’ body and her socially valued, exchangeable body, which is a particularly mimetic expression of masculine values” (804).
Note that dividedness here denotes rather a pathological state!
Female sexuality
”This means that the division of ’labor’ – sexual labor in particular – requires that woman maintain in her own body the material substratum of desire, but that she herself never have access to desire.
The economy of desire – of exchange – is man’s business.
And that economy subjects women to a schism that is necessary to symbolic operations: red blood/semblance; body/value-interested envelope; matter/medium of exchange; (re)productive nature/fabricated femininity…
That schism – characteristic of all speaking nature, someone will surely object – is experienced by women without any possible profit to them.
And without any way for them to transcend it.
They are not even ’conscious’ of it…
naturally, they remain amorphous, suffering from drives without any possible representatives or representations” (809).
