Question Of Sexual Difference Research Articles

Deconstrucción, soberanía y singularidad en el “enigma” femenino. Entrecruces entre Derrida y Luce Irigaray

El presente trabajo tiene por objeto delinear un posible cruce entre el pensamiento de Luce Irigaray y Jacques Derrida. En un primer momento, dicha transacción será llevada a cabo en torno al eje de la deconstrucción, enfatizando la resistencia al principio del poder (soberanía) y la cuestión de la singularidad como puntos gravitantes de la crítica al orden falogocéntrico que ambos impugnan. Posteriormente, de la mano de lo que puede considerarse un giro material-sexual de la deconstrucción llevado a cabo por Irigaray, se abordará la pregunta por lo femenino en el psicoanálisis de Freud para reconstruir, finalmente, la evaluación que ambos autores hacen de la propuesta freudiana, mostrando qué aspectos rompen con la tradición de pensamiento occidental y, sobretodo, cuáles renuevan su compromiso con los fundamentos del falogocentrismo.

Questioning the Phallus: Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler

ABSTRACTThis article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler responded critically in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, published in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Lacan explains that the symbolic phallic function is the “anchor”’ from and around which the symbolic works and ties the discussion to the question of sexual difference by explaining that men and women are positioned differently in relation to it. Butler charges that Lacan’s schema is heteronormative—because it is limited to the male/female schema—and patriarchal because within that heteronormative framework it affirms the masculine perspective. Rather than follow the usual route taken by recent Lacanian scholarship on this issue and focus on Lacan’s later works, especially Seminar XX on female sexuality, I appeal to the contents of two works written in the same year (1958) as “The Signification of the Phallus”—Seminar V and “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”—to offer a qualified defense of Lacan that accepts that his early framework is heteronormative but questions the patriarchal charge by showing that within these pre-Seminar XX texts he explicitly works to undermine that logic.

Sexual Difference and Gathering in Geschlecht III

Derrida states at the beginning of Geschlecht III that at stake is the question of sexual difference, one that is referred in Heidegger’s 1953 essay on Trakl to a twofoldness that precedes the opposition of sexual duality, a duality which, according to Derrida, neutralizes sexual difference. I follow the development of what Derrida also called the “dream” of “another sexual difference,” one that would not be ruled by the opposition of the two. Derrida’s guiding interpretation in Geschlecht III is that Heidegger privileges “gathering” (Versammlung) and the reference to the “one” in this thinking of difference, and of sexual difference, thereby neutralizing difference. Drawing a contrast between difference as polysemy (gathered) and difference as dissemination (dispersion), I attempt in what follows to discuss Derrida’s interpretation, raising questions concerning some of his readings with respect to the motifs of dispersion, dissemination, polysemy, and gathering.

From Neutral Dasein to a Gentle Twofold

This paper attempts to situate Derrida’s newly discovered Geschlecht III in the four-part series Derrida dedicated to the question of sexual difference in Heidegger. Taking its point of departure from an interview conducted two years prior to Geschlecht I, the paper retraces Derrida’s itinerary toward the culminating point of the Geschlecht series, Geschlecht III, the “magnet” that orients and attracts the other three. I argue that Derrida’s initial enthusiasm for a Heideggerian “pre-dual sexuality” in Geschlecht I is significantly tempered by Derrida’s meticulous reading of Heidegger in Geschlecht III, where his reservations vis-à-vis Heidegger’s neutralization of sexual difference become all the more serious and explicit. As I show, Derrida’s “dream” of a “doubly asymmetrical” sexual relation to the other remains incompatible with the sexual gentleness Heidegger imagines between brother and sister, an ultimately Christian incest that will yet again threaten to neutralize and erase the more radical sexual difference Derrida is trying to think.

El devenir-mujer de todo devenir. Una lectura mater-realista de "Mil mesetas"

In section 10 of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari point out their dynamic monism with the affirmation of becoming-woman in the beginning, middle, and key of all becoming. The question of sexual difference is thus introduced, and restored into the place of radical ontological difference, from which one becomes and exists. The following pages aim at reading the mater-realistic immanence of becoming in the light of that first conceptive and medial movement, with an interpretation that intercepts Deleuzean and Guattarian vitalism through Feminism of Difference.

“Make no provision for the flesh”: recognizing the incarnation in and after Augustine

ABSTRACTThis article argues for the importance of the intelligibility of the sexed body to incarnational theology. Building on Mark Jordan's reading of Augustine, I focus on the paradox of the incarnation as both the bodily sign (signa) of God and God Godself as the thing that the sign signifies (res). Through an analysis of the debates around Leo Steinberg's work on the meaning of Christ's genitals in Renaissance art, I explore the ways in which depicting the incarnation is a paradoxical exercise of depicting God's fully human body. I argue that attention to the paradox of the incarnation as both sign and thing can disrupt ideologies of sexual difference that force bodies to be intelligible as unambiguously sexed, while the question of sexual difference can work within incarnational theology to disturb the equivalence of full humanity and unambiguous maleness.

A Revolution of Love: Thinking through a Dialectic that is Not “One”

Luce Irigaray argues that the way to overcome the culture of narcissism in the Western tradition is to recognize sexuate difference and to refigure subjectivity as sexuate. This article is an attempt to unpack how Irigaray's philosophical refiguring of love as an intermediary works in this process of reimagining subjectivity as sexuate. If we trace the moments in Irigaray's philosophy where she engages with Hegel's dialectic, and rethinks this dialectical process via the question of sexual difference and a refiguring of love, a clearer reading of her work as groundbreaking and ultimately refiguring our (Western) ontological structures becomes possible. Consequently, if we do not understand Irigaray's radical reformulation of love, we will miss her larger ontological project and fail to properly appreciate her comments on other types of difference—for example, differences of race, tradition, religion. This article argues that as we begin to appreciate the ways in which Irigaray refigures both love and thought as the intermediary, an intermediary that fundamentally disrupts phallocentric binary logic, we can begin to imagine how refiguring the most intimate human experience of love can lead us toward the realization of an ethical political community in which difference in all forms is nourished.

Sexuality of subject : The question of sexual difference in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy

Sexuality of subject : The question of sexual difference in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy

Rewriting the Human at the End of the Anthropocene in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

This article argues that Margaret Atwood’s postapocalyptic MaddAddam trilogy, composed of the novels Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, imagines how humankind might come to reconstitute itself at the end of the Anthropocene—that is, once it has decimated the planet and driven itself to the brink of extinction. The answer that Atwood offers is bound up with the question of sexual difference. This novel suggests that rewriting “the human” at the end of the Anthropocene will require destabilizing mankind’s dominion not just over the natural world it inhabits but over womankind as well. The article argues that in the MaddAddam trilogy, the relation between “man” and “woman” is negotiated through the relation between the biopolitical management of life and the ethical response to individual lives that have been deemed disposable.

After Alice After Cats in Derrida'sL'animal que donc je suis

In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from (other than human) others that calls for an account of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat(s) in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making.

Digesting Difference: Metabolism and the Question of Sexual Difference

Elizabeth Grosz’s research program offers a thoughtful and complex argument for sexual difference as ontology. Gathering together Grosz’s considerable writing, which she synthesizes in her most recent book, Becoming Undone , this essay explores Grosz’s engagement of sexual difference through evolutionary theory. This refraction invites challenging questions with which feminist theory might think through one of its defining issues. A close reading of Grosz’s work reveals contradictions, tensions, and problems in discussions of being versus becoming; duration versus the stasis of sexual difference; and neo-Darwinian humanism versus Darwinian inhumanism, and the former’s consequent normalizing of sexual difference. The essay concludes with a discussion of metabolism as sexual difference’s potential foil. Refracting metabolism – as a force – through evolutionary theory excites the significant contradictions that sexual difference as ontology sustains in Grosz’s analysis.

The Nature of Sexual Difference

This paper addresses the question of sexual difference as a pre-eminent question not only of cultural and social but also of biological relations. If sexual difference is a biological force then it must pervade the world of animals as much as the cultural world of humans. Charles Darwin’s work may provide a framework from which to understand Luce Irigaray’s central conception of sexual difference. This paper explores the possible relations between them.

Da crítica feminista e a escrita feminina

A crítica feminista constituiu-se como um modelo conceitual de questionamento da cultura dominante, mas também uma prática de leitura e análise da produção de autoria feminina. Tendo no centro do debate teórico a questão da diferença sexual e da existência de uma escrita feminina, a ginocrítica propõe a redefinição dos pressupostos de uma cultura que impôs um paradigma que manteve a mulher afastada da produção simbólica. Este trabalho enuncia algumas dessas questões.

Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and Chodorow

Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and Chodorow Alison Stone God the Father and Jesus the Son; Abraham and Isaac; Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus; Zeus and Dionysus; Hamlet and his father; Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons—representations of and fantasies about father-son relationships are central to Western culture and philosophy. Within philosophy, one thinks of Hegel’s conception of the dialectic in terms of the divine trinity, Nietzsche’s preoccupation with Christ and Dionysus, or Kierkegaard’s meditations on Abraham’s near-murder of Isaac. In contrast, mother-daughter relationships have been shrouded in near-universal silence—much more so than representations of either mothers and sons (Oedipus and Jocasta; Mary and Jesus) or fathers and daughters (Agamemnon and Iphigenia; Lear and Cordelia). Female and feminist theorists, writers, and artists have done much to bring mother-daughter relationships into representation and to reimagine the maternal beyond its traditional subservience to father-son dynasties. Amongst continental feminists, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have, of course, made major contributions to this task. Within Anglophone feminism, too, feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have sought to rectify Freud’s overemphasis on the paternal and on father-son relations. Nancy Chodorow’s important work in this area paints a portrait of contemporary mother-daughter relations which seems, at first sight, strikingly similar to Irigaray’s. Both thinkers suggest that mothers and their infant daughters experience a unique level of mutual identification. But under patriarchy—specifically, given exclusively female childrearing for Chodorow and given the absence of any symbolization of female subjectivity for Irigaray—daughters are forced to turn to the father [End Page 45] to achieve any psychical independence from their mothers. The independence that daughters thus attain coexists with ongoing psychical identification with their mothers, so that women oscillate endlessly between separation from and mergence with their mothers. If the dominant template for father-son relations involves violent rivalry followed by guilt-ridden father-worship as the cement of fraternal society, as Freud described in Totem and Taboo (Freud 2001), the template for mother-daughter relations involves hostile separation constantly undone by ongoing fusion. This difference in templates maps the social-symbolic difference between the paternal position of power/authority/law and the maternal position of powerlessness/silence/body. However, the manifest similarities between Irigaray’s and Chodorow’s pictures are embedded in deep theoretical differences. The details of their descriptions of mother-daughter relations differ, and they give different explanations for why these relations follow a logic of separation and fusion: female mothering for Chodorow, the paternal symbolic order for Irigaray. They make different proposals for how to change these relations: shared parenting for Chodorow versus symbolic transformation for Irigaray. They hold conflicting conceptions of the self and of language, reflecting their heterogeneous psychoanalytic backgrounds in Anglo-American object relations versus French Lacanianism and poststructuralism. These deep differences raise questions about whether Chodorow and Irigaray are discussing mother-daughter relations in the same sense at all. Bringing Irigaray and Chodorow together across their different intellectual contexts, this article compares and partially synthesizes their visions of the maternal and of mother-daughter relations. By integrating their perspectives, we can move beyond the “impasse” between Lacanian and object-relations feminisms that dominated psychoanalytic feminist debates in the 1980s and 1990s (Brennan 1991)—debates that have crucially shaped continental feminists’ orientation towards questions of sexual difference, language and representation, and the embodied psyche. The impasse in question has at least two strands. First, for object-relations feminists such as Chodorow, our pre-Oedipal relations with our mothers shape us so that we acquire “core” selves with a fairly stable gender. This approach elevates the mother in importance (compared to classical psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the father), but it loses sight of psychic and gender instability. This can make Chodorow’s views seem rather dated given the impact of Judith Butler’s work and her emphasis on the unstable, shifting nature of gender. Lacanian feminists such as Jacquelyn Rose (Rose 1986) reemphasize psychic instability, but they do so by stressing that the subject is split between paternal language and the pre-Oedipal maternal realm, which means that these theorists also...

An Antidote to Metaphysics: Adriana Cavarero’s Vocal Philosophy

I am convinced that the best antidote to meta-physics is singing. Adriana with Elisabetta Bertolino, Beyond Ontology and Sexual Difference: An Interview with the Italian Feminist Philosopher Adriana Cavarero The body of the voice/the voice of the body. Meredith Monk, Notes on the ADRIANA CAVARERO HAS BEEN ONE OF Italy's foremost feminist philosophers since the 1980s. Her work has ranged widely from early investigations of dialectics and politics in Plato to her reflections on contemporary violence and ethics. Through it all, is concerned with something that has in some quarters of postmodern philosophy and musicology become unpopular--a conception of selfhood founded on a unique embodied existent. Since the early 2000s has turned toward voice as the means of elaborating her antimetaphysical project. With her turn toward the sonic and the vocal she has gradually come to the attention of music scholars. (1) encourages us to rethink philosophical problems shared by many theories of voice: the question of sexual difference and its audibility, the peculiar affects in hearing and desiring voices, the mediation of voices, and the modes of relation and communication they make possible. engages each of these questions in an important body of work founded in feminist thought that demonstrates the importance of vocality to any consideration of ethics, subjectivity, and human difference. What follows is a polyphonic weave of historical and theoretical reflections with the voice of as the cantus firmus. I offer an introduction, critique, and extension of the work of a philosopher whose concern with matters of voice and vocal expression deserves recognition and response from musicologists. (2) It was in the pages of this journal that Mary Ann Smart and Annamaria Cecconi first brought Cavarero's philosophy of vocal expression--For More than One Voice (hereafter FMTOV)--into an ongoing conversation within musicology about voices, philosophy, and gender. (3) Indeed, with its provocative emphasis on sexual difference, politics, the corporeal basis of vocal enunciation, and an ethics of relation and mutual vulnerability, Cavarero's philosophy is a welcome addition to the musicological toolkit--especially as scholars intensify a turn toward issues of presence, mediation, and performance) Even as some musicologists have begun to take notice of Cavarero's work, none have noted how she herself arrived at vocal expression as a topic of philosophical reflection. Indeed, her reputation is based on and her most important work has been done in the Italian tradition of sexual difference feminism. She has typically avoided musical matters. Yet I argue that her vocal turn is of a piece with her earlier work. The model of vocal expression she develops in FMTOV combines a philosophical basis in Hannah Arendt's conception of action, a theoretical grounding in the thought of sexual difference, and her own practical participation in the feminist philosophical collective Diotima. (5) Cavarero's pragmatic, feminist, and political genealogy for her vocal philosophy is in stark contrast to conceptions of voice based on psychoanalysis, performativity, or linguistic anthropology. (6) This is not to suggest that such approaches are hOt valuable or that she herself is entirely distinct from those traditions but to note that Cavarero's conception of vocality brings to our attention uncommon interlocutors for musicology, namely, the work of Arendt and Italian feminism. (7) As I argue, Cavarero's intellectual underpinnings must be taken into account if we are to recognize the full force and utility of her vocal philosophy to recent practices of musicology. My efforts to articulate the relationship of FMTOV to Cavarero's earlier thought are necessary, as she does not always make those links apparent. The first section of this essay is devoted to this task and draws out the importance of Cavarero's concepts of sexual difference, natality, and embodied uniqueness to her vocal philosophy. …

The Riddle of Sex: Biological Theories of Sexual Difference in the Early Twentieth-Century

At the turn of the twentieth century, biologists such as Oscar Riddle, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Frank Lillie, and Richard Goldschmidt all puzzled over the question of sexual difference, the distinction between male and female. They all offered competing explanations for the biological cause of this difference, and engaged in a fierce debate over the primacy of their respective theories. Riddle propounded a metabolic theory of sex dating from the late-nineteenth century suggesting that metabolism lay at the heart of sexual difference. Thomas Hunt Morgan insisted on the priority of chromosomes, Frank Lillie emphasized the importance of hormones, while Richard Goldschmidt supported a mixed model involving both chromosomes and hormones. In this paper, I will illustrate how the older metabolic theory of sex was displaced when those who argued for the relatively newer theories of chromosomes and hormones gradually formed an alliance that accommodated each other and excluded the metabolic theory of sex. By doing so, proponents of chromosomes and hormones established their authority over the question of sexual difference as they laid the foundations for the new disciplines of genetics and endocrinology. Their debate raised urgent questions about what constituted sexual difference, and how scientists envisioned the plasticity and controllability of this difference. These theories also had immediate political and cultural consequences at the turn of the twentieth century, especially for the eugenic and feminist movements, both of which were heavily invested in knowledge of sex and its determination, ascertainment, and command.

Paradoxes of femininity in the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir

This article explicates the meaning of the paradox from the perspective of sexual difference, as articulated by Simone de Beauvoir. I claim that the self, the other, and their becoming are sexed in Beauvoir’s early literary writing before the question of sexual difference is posed in The Second Sex (1949). In particular, Beauvoir’s description of Francoise’s subjective becoming in the novel She Came to Stay (1943) anticipates her later systematic description of ‘the woman in love’. In addition, I argue that the different existential types appearing at the end of The Second Sex (the narcissist, the woman in love, the mystic, and the independent woman) are variations of a specific feminine, historically changing paradox of subjectivity. According to this paradox, women, in a different mode than men, must become what they ontologically “are”: beings of change and self-transcendence that have to realise the human condition in their concrete, singular lives. My interpretation draws on Kierkegaardian philosophy of existence, phenomenology, and early psychoanalysis.

The Fable of the Stork and Other False Sexual Theories

differences began publishing in the midst of a climate change in feminist relations to psychoanalysis and the question of sexual difference. As many scholars began to pay theoretical attention to other kinds of difference as well as sexual differences, some argued that this obligation entailed not just a widening of focus but a critique of psychoanalysis as ahistorical and an abandonment of the notion of sexual difference in favor of gender. Gender, Copjec argues in this paper, is a neutered term; it eliminates sex. It is time, this essay proposes, to provide an ontological reflection on sex and sexuality.

Questions d’identité sexuée : l’histoire refoulée de l’art

Questions of sexual identity : repressed history of art Until the grand narrative of modernism and without that it is never questioned or even explicitly formulated, the history of art was mainly written in the masculine, confining women in roles such as model and subject. Since the late 1960’s, in the predominantly Anglo-Saxon field of gender studies, the question of sexual difference has been reintroduced by studying the mechanisms of historic exclusion of women, by removing the dominant discourse, through figures embodying sexual ambiguity such as Marcel Duchamp, as well as by contact with feminist movements and theories. The authors present the news of such research and the lines of force of these various studies that work to produce the means of an alternative discourse beyond categories and oppositions.

Aristotelian Dunamis and Sexual Difference

As is well known, according to the Aristotelian theory of sexual difference, the female is a sort of deformed or mutilated male. The word Aristotle uses for this deformation of the female is anaperia, the most common usage of which refers to male castration.1 In sexual reproduction, a female offspring is produced because of some fault in the proceedings, most commonly an inadequacy of heat in the reproductive process, and furthermore, in herself the female does not possess the capability to create a seed that would carry forth her form to subsequent generations. The female contributes matter to the offspring, not logos, movement, or form, and this is because she is, for Aristotle, characterized by "a certain inability" (adunamia).2 Everywhere, then, the female is identified with lack, incapacity, falling short, and failure, while the male contribution, the sperm, is by contrast described as possessing "great potency" (megalen echei dunamin).3 This essay attempts to think through the account ofdunamis given in Metaphysics Theta taking the question of sexual difference as a guide. In Theta, Aristotle carefully elaborates the definition of dunamis and in this way prepares the ground for the discussion of energeia, the Ideological culmination of Aristotelian metaphysics and cosmology. He first gives the primary definition of dunamis, a "principle (arche) of change in another or in the thing itself qua other," about which much may be said in its own right.4 Here, I will limit my investigation to two subsequent modes of dunamis discussed in Theta 1 and 2, namely adunamia, incapacity, and dunamis meta logou, potentiality according to logos or rational potentiality (given the range of meanings covered by Greek logos-word, account, formula, reason, narrative, discourse, calculation, etc.-I will leave it untranslated). While feminist philosophers have rightly focused on the connections between form and the masculine, and matter and the feminine in Aristotle's account of substance, Aristotle's formulation of being according to potentiality and actuality cannot be mapped so easily on to conceptions of gender. This issue has been largely ignored by feminist commentators, with the exception of Charlotte Witt, whose investigations lead her to conclude that Aristotle's hierarchy of gender is not fundamental to the constitution of his Metaphysics.5 By contrast, in what follows I will show that paying close attention to the tropes and figures of sexual difference offered by the text will disclose an agonic encounter between the dunamis meta logou, the rational logos of the scientist, and materiality as dunamis alogon, irrational dunamis, in which the most fundamental stakes are those of gender. This approach will also assist in identifying and teasing apart a knot comprised by the anxiety of masculine impotence and the threat of feminine weakness and lack inherent in the notion ofadunamia, as well as resolving some interpretive difficulties in Book Theta. At the close of Metaphysics Theta, Aristotle turns to the dunamis-energeia couplet in an attempt to provide a solution to the problem of the unity of substance. This, briefly stated, is the problem of how particular substance, a "this," tode ti, for example a bronze sphere, can be thought of as a unity. Up until this point, Aristotle has analyzed the "this" as a composite of matter and form, the bronze on the one hand, the sphere on the other. Neither in itself is sufficient as a candidate for substance, for neither fully accounts for the unified substance that one can hold in one's hand, that is, the "this," which is Aristotle's concern. However, if both matter and form are present in the "this," the hylomorph, what is it that subtends their apparent unity? He writes that "the proximate matter and the form are one and the same; the one exists potentially, the other as actuality (men dunamei, to de energeia). Therefore to ask the cause of the unity is like asking the cause of unity in general; for each individual thing is one, and the potential and the actual are in a sense one. …