Making Mischief: Thinking Through Women’s Solidarity and Sexuate Difference with Luce Irigaray and Gayatri Spivak

Abstract

Luce Irigaray’s thinking through of intersubjectivity in terms of the relations between two sexuate subjects raises the question, as Gail Schwab suggests, of thinking through sexuate difference as a global model for ethics.1 In this chapter, I turn to Gayatri Spivak’s work in order to meditate further on the possibility of thinking through an Irigarayan-inspired ethics of sexuate difference in our contemporary global contexts. How can we articulate a universal ethics of sexuate difference? What issues does this raise for structuring relations between and among women? How do we communicate cross-culturally between traditions in a way that, as I argue elsewhere, Luce Irigaray attempts to do in Between East and West?2 With these questions in mind, this chapter examines how Spivak mobilises Irigaray’s work on sexuate difference to address women’s solidarity and what this suggests about the possibility of cross-cultural communication between and among women.