Luce Irigaray and the Nature of Sexual Difference

This book defends an understanding of sexual difference as natural, challenging the prevailing consensus within feminist theory that sexual difference is a culturally constructed and symbolically articulated phenomenon. The book supports this challenge with a distinctive interpretation and critical rethinking of Luce Irigaray's later philosophy of sexual difference. According to my interpretation, the later Irigaray sees sexual difference as a natural difference between the sexes, which should receive cultural and social expression. Opposing the dominant view that any idea that sexual difference is natural must be politically conservative and epistemologically naïve, I want to show that Irigaray's later conception of sexual difference is philosophically sophisticated and coherent, and supports a politics of change which – importantly – aspires not only to improve women's situations but also to revalue nature and to improve humanity's relations with the natural world. However, I will not simply defend the later Irigaray but will criticise her for overlooking what I call the natural multiplicity within each of our bodies: a multiplicity of forces and capacities such that we are never simply sexually specific. Given this problem, I shall argue, Irigaray's philosophy must be fundamentally rethought within the framework of a theory of nature as self-differentiating, a theory which can recognise the reality and value of bodily multiplicity as well as that of sexual duality.