The question of Irigaray's ‘essentialism’ has long been at the centre of controversy over the value of her work to feminist theory and politics. Yet the long-standing debates around Irigaray's essentialism may seem recently to have been laid to rest by the proliferation of scholarly investigations of the philosophical underpinnings of her thought, especially her thorough engagement with central themes from the history of philosophy. One might imagine this research to have decisively superseded tired discussions of Irigaray's essentialism, which, one might suppose, were insufficiently philosophically informed to yield significant insight into her work. Actually, though, preceding debates over Irigaray's work have generated a network of now-standard assumptions about essentialism which continue to inform the otherwise diverse ways in which she is currently read.

In particular, those earlier debates have inspired a now-widespread assumption that no realist form of essentialism is acceptable and that, accordingly, Irigaray can only be read as essentialist in some distinctively non-realist sense. By ‘realism’, I mean the view that we can know about the world as it is independently of our practices and modes of representation. I therefore understand a realist form of essentialism to consist of the view that male and female bodies can be known to have essentially different characters, different characters which really exist, independently of how we represent and culturally inhabit these bodies. Realist essentialism, then, can equally be expressed as the view that natural differences between the sexes exist, prior to our cultural activities.