Giving in Heterosexual Relations: Luce Irigaray and the Commodification of the Signified Woman Hannah Quicksell Grinnell College, USA

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1 Giving in Heterosexual Relations: Luce Irigaray and the Commodification of the Signified Woman Hannah Quicksell Grinnell College, USA Traditionally, in western society s kinship systems, discourse divides people into two intelligible groups: men and women. Historically, in many culture s kinship structures, women were given as gifts between men, from man (father) to man (husband). As with any giving of gifts, in due time, the recipient must reciprocate with the appropriate gift either to the giver or to another person, thereby expanding the relationship. In arranged marriages such as these, the husband tended to reciprocate through a form of a dowry, possibly an alliance, and in the future became a father himself and gave his daughter to a following generation s husband. Moreover, kinship systems did not purely exchange women, They [exchanged] sexual access, genealogical statuses, lineage names and ancestors, rights and people. 1 When the father gives his daughter, she symbolically wears and displays these commodities mentioned above. She is symbolically marked with carrying these commodities that belonged to her father to have and protect, and in her being given to the husband, they then belong to him. This entails that 1 Gayle Rubin, The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, in The Second Sex: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 38.

2 women do not have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin. In this sense, the exchange of women is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have full rights to themselves. 2 The kinship structure in place that exchanged women marked them, according to Claude Levi-Strauss in the linguistic sense, as both sign and value. 3 Today, arranged marriages are not a majority practice in the dominant, western society; fathers do not overtly give their daughters away to marry in exchange for any tangible form of reciprocation. Under the present discourse s influences, if a man and a woman marry, go on a date, enter a relationship, or engage in consensual sex, it is through their own choice that they enter into enter an intimate relationship. All of these intimate relationships are spaces founded on various forms of gift giving. Assuming a healthy relationship, the man and woman would give each other their time, energy, pleasure, material gifts, and love. Like any other structure of gift giving, they would give these without immediate expectation that they should be returned, and in the correct range of time, the other would reciprocate as they see fit. However, about 40 years ago, Belgian-born, French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray exposes that men and women are not born equal into the phallogocentric discourse. Despite the fact that This Sex Which Is Not One is decades old, Irigaray s work still describes much of the way women enter into social society. She argues in the social, symbolic order that people who are socially marked as women, while in different ways, are still commodified with many of the same things that they were marked with during the period of practicing arranged marriages. Irigaray writes: 2 Ibid., Ibid., 53.

3 [T]hus in a situation of specific exploitation with respect to exchange operations 4 : sexual exchanges, but also economic, social, and cultural exchanges in general. A woman enters into these exchanges only as the object of a transaction, unless she agrees to renounce the specificity of her sex, whose identity is imposed on her according to models that remain foreign to her. Women s social inferiority is reinforced and complicated by the fact that woman does not have access to language, except through recourse to masculine systems of representation. 5 Irigaray reveals women s lack of access to phallogocentric discourse that simultaneously bars women from a fair space in language and identifies them as a commodity. If every social interaction places women at a lesser place than the discursive subject, and additionally, the woman does not have full claim to her body, then intimate, heterosexual relationships will always be asymmetrical. 6 The risk of being appropriated runs when the man is fully instilled with this phallogocentric gaze. There are cases in which the socially identified man does not have the discursive power to possess the woman, or the relation unknowingly resists discourse and operates on giving in a balanced manner. However, there will always be the impersonal, abstract phallogocentric gaze of discourse outside of the two people, which marks the woman as 4 Irigaray uses the language exchanged, which I will avoid solely because whether authentic or not, women who enter into consensual, heterosexual engagements feel that they made the choice. 5 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (New York, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), While it is not my project, I must clarify that not all socially identified men are necessarily more powerful than women, due to intersections of race, ethnicity, and class, and so, all men may not be capable of possessing women in the way that Irigaray describes.

4 the other. The process of commodification can happen independent of the singular man in the heterosexual relationship with her. To understand how women are commodified and exploited in gift based, intimate relations, Irigaray provides an extensive analysis of present day discourse and the effects of the signifier woman. Nevertheless, Irigaray fails to realize there needs to be a radical restructuring of sex and gender in discourse in which our conceptions of pleasure, affection, and sex/gender may not even be recognizable in order for socially identified women to not be hierarchically de-privileged and lacking the ability to speak their experience. Irigaray s conceptions of the exploitation, exclusion, and possession of women are the result of a discourse that controls sexuality. French theorist Michel Foucault, in his book The History of Sexuality Volume 1, concludes that [d]iscourse transmits and produces power, 7 and furthermore, that it is in discourse that epistemology gains power to be known as Truth. 8 In today s discourse, people are still categorized under the signifiers man and woman, which assume them to be heterosexual counterparts. In reality, there is no natural or logical reason that men and women should be presumed to be heterosexual. However, unless he or she otherwise publicly announces his or her preference to be of an alternative lifestyle, he or she will be assumed to be attracted to the designated, opposite sex. A woman can find support and sexual pleasure in other ways, and additionally in the present day, a woman can be economically independent from a man and bear children from sperm donation that is free from penis-vaginal penetration. Despite this, the majority of women are not part of a large-scale separatist 7 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1990), Ibid., 100.

5 movement, but identify as heterosexual and pursue that lifestyle. Rather, women and men are continually (re)produced through phallogocentric process, [the] silent and hidden inscription of the heterosexual, conjugal, procreative couple as the natural norm of human sexuality an inscription that it must not make explicit and cannot risk exposing if it is to represent it as, simple, the Truth. 9 Man and woman, as signifying identities, are tied to heterosexuality and being each other s counterpart. These individual instances of man and woman joining together are part of a pattern that enter into an over-all strategy. 10 According to Foucault s Rule of Double Conditioning, the way in which power-knowledge and compulsory heterosexuality are deployed operate on these two levels, singular events and grand scale discourse, in which There is no discontinuity between them, as if one were dealing with two different levels (one microscopic and the other macroscopic); but neither is there homogeneity (as if the one were only the enlarged projection or the miniaturization of the other). 11 The hierarchization of man and woman, and naturalized compulsory heterosexuality exists because of the reinforcement by individual events, and men and women are influenced to make these events through omnipresent discourse. Through omnipresent discourse and power, women and men become ontological entities that are sexually and intimately called to be partnered. Irigaray argues that men and women, as discursive identities, are marked with more naturalized characteristics than only heterosexuality. The current western 9 Shannon Winnubst, Exceeding Hegel and Lacan: Different Fields of Pleasure within Foucault and Irigaray, Hypatia 14, no. 1 (1999): Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, Ibid.,

6 discourse is violently phallogocentric. 12 While the discursive identities place restrictions on men as well, the linguistic violence and repercussions in regards to women is far more pressing, because women are trapped in a system of meaning which serves the auto-affection of the masculine subject. 13 First, this entails that a woman is not able to express her desire or claim her speech in the language available, since it is a language that only speaks the forms of masculinity. Second, the identity of a woman is trapped in a masculine linguistic perspective of what woman is. The word woman ontologizes socially identified women into a category that represents what the masculine wants rather than explaining some essence of the feminized people. The operations of our phallogocentric discourse at once call men and women to be heterosexual, exclude women from speaking their experience, and mark them as a masculine commodity. Because the discursively marked woman always represents what the masculine wants, she becomes a commodity. Moreover, a woman becomes the commodity, other, and reflection of the man; she represents the identity the man desires to possess most. Irigaray sees women as simultaneously fragmented by their two bodies: the natural, meaningless body and the socially valued commodified body. 14 In a relation between a man and a woman, it is not the woman and her essence that are subject to be appropriated: 12 The masculine, like the feminine, is also an abstract concept that does not entirely belong to socially identified men either. However, because discourse speaks only masculinely, it renders men the capability to desire and own their words and bodies. 13 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray, Women on the Market, in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, ed. Alan D. Schrift (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 180.

7 But when women are exchanged, woman s body must be treated as an abstraction...it can only come about when two objects two women are in relation of equality with a third term that is neither the one nor the other. It is thus not as women that they are exchanged, but as women reduced to some common feature their current price in gold, or phalluses and of which they would represent a plus or minus quantity. 15 To some extent, people in today s society recognize women as autonomous beings, but no one woman can escape mild to severe abstract commodification. Although not in a unified way, all socially identified women cannot escape the ever-present phallocentric gaze that abstracts them into a commodity with a phallic or monetary equivalent. Hence, it is not the woman in her essence that makes her vulnerable to being possessed, but her discursive existence where she exists as abstract, symbolic capital. The plus or minus quality in regards to phallic value and the treatment of women based on the fact that they are commodified varies greatly. In current western society, there are further social intersections of race, ethnicity, disability, and class that cause women to be commodified in different ways. When Irigaray claims that discourse sublimates women into identical phantom-like realities, she initially seems essentialist. 16 However, Irigaray does not mean that each individual woman s experience is identically the same, or that all women undergo technically the same commodification. Her claim is far more abstract: it claims that all women are commodified as phallic value and are unable to speak in a manner that 15 Ibid., Ibid.

8 could be feminine. Irigaray references Levi-Strauss s kinship structure analysis when he says, even if there were as many women as men, these women would not all be equally desirable. 17 In this quote, although likely unintended by Levi-Strauss, the desire he references is the discursive desire to commodify and appropriate women. As a result, the difference in desire reflects back that women are commodified and appropriated differently based on additional forms of social othering, individual personality, and gender performance. Irigaray claims that when women are abstracted to become commodities, they find their equivalent in gold, or phalluses. There are instances in which a woman is commodified to an abstract concept of woman and seemingly bought, like a stripper at a bachelor s party. The sex worker has an abstract value in relation to other women, determined by social discourse, that, in turn, becomes a price tag. However, in present western society, consensual relationships that are not sex work are supposed to operate as mutual exchange, wherein autonomous beings give of themselves pleasure and/or love. Similarly, Hélène Cixous, in spite of the differences between her project and Irigaray s, describes how the imbalance between men s and women s giving arises. Both men and women give, expecting something in return, whether a question, of capital or of affectivity (or of love, of jouissance). 18 Both parties, though not overtly, expect to receive an appropriate reciprocation for the gifts they give to the other. Cixous paints the caricatures that the woman doesn t try to recover her expenses 19 whereas men gives a gift-that- 17 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, Hélène Cixous, Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays, in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, ed. Alan D. Schrift (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), Ibid., 159.

9 takes. 20 If the man gives the gift-that-takes, he appropriates the woman as phallic value. 21 The value of women as symbolic, phallic valued commodities is that women are a mirror of value of and for man. 22 Symbolically taking the woman the commodity, the other reflects masculinity back upon the man. In addition to the love and pleasure the woman as a giver can give, the commodified woman is the phallus and reflects masculinity back to the man. The phallic value makes women what the man, as an identity category, most desires to appropriate. The most blatant way discourse masculinely possesses a woman in practice is through her family name. Although women and children are not legally property anymore, they symbolically belong to the husband/father under his patrilineal last name. Irigaray explains, To be sure, the means of production have evolved new techniques have been developed, but it does seem that as soon as the father-man was assured of his reproductive power and had marked his products with his name, that is, from the very origin of private property and the patriarchal family, social exploitation occurred. 23 When a woman changes her name from her father s to her husband s, he symbolically claims her as his. Furthermore, by putting his name on the nuclear family s children, he quite literally claims her labor. If a woman belongs to a man as property symbolically, or she submerges her fluid identity into his stable identity, it stops being a gifting relationship 20 Ibid. 21 As noted before, Foucault s Rule of Double Conditioning constitutes that each individual event where a woman does not recover her expenses or a man gives the gift-that-takes is autonomous. However, these events become a pattern of a grand scale narrative, and, each time an event similarly happens, it reinforces the narrative. 22 Irigaray, Women on the Market, Ibid., 176.

10 between two people. Instead, the husband owes the wife no more than he sees fit, whereas she continues to be his property that must provide for his wants. The most recent study on women changing their last names at marriage found that still about half of the women in the United States took their husbands last names in 2005, which is a negligible difference since the 1970s. 24 In addition, the number of women that kept their maiden name has been on the decline since the mid-1990s. 25 Even if a woman keeps her last name or hyphenates it, the name is her father s name; there is no non-patrilineal line. Moreover, if a woman does choose to keep her father s name in hopes of re-appropriating it as a her own, the structures in place make it difficult to function socially; bills and transactions become a hassle and many people will simply assume the two are divorced. The patrilineal family name possesses the woman and makes an equal giving relationship between husband and wife symbolically difficult, because the discursive structure places her inferiorly in the relationships of father/child and husband/wife. More clear than in long term relationships or marriage, the language surrounding jouissance exposes women s masculine representation in discourse. For Irigaray, this begs the question, Does this mean that woman s sexual evolution can never be characterized with reference to the female sex itself? 26 In present day western society, the answer is yes. Today s phallogocentric discourse is historically produced by a philosophical order, reasserted by Freud, that reifies the masculine as the sexual model, that no representation of desire can 24 Richard Kopelman, et. al., The Bride Is Keeping Her Name: A 35- Year Retrospective Analysis of Trends and Correlates, Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal 37, no. 5 (2009): Ibid. 26 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 69.

11 fail to take it as the standard, can fail to submit to it. 27 Irigaray explains that phallogocentrism characterizes and ontologizes feminine sexuality as being constituted by the valorization of reproduction and nursing; faithfulness; modesty, ignorance and even lack of interest in sexual pleasure; a passive acceptance of men s activity ; seductiveness, in order to arouse the consumers desire while offering herself as its material support without getting pleasure herself. 28 While a woman may personally want to have a child for the companionship, Irigaray sees the situation as giving life to another and a child-property to the husband. Additionally, the woman is expected to be passive while simultaneously giving to the man s desire; she is only sexual insofar as she can attract the man. When a woman s sexuality is described, it is always described in auto-affectionate terms of a heterosexual masculinity. Because of woman s lack of representation in regards to jouissance, she is marked by man s sexuality, which sets up a sexual situation of non-reciprocity. When a person says, We had sex three times typically means the man entered the women three times and orgasmed three times. 29 To have sex complete, it only takes into account the activity of the man; the woman is implicitly present in this statement, but entirely passive. More than likely, the man is not necessarily stingy or consciously intending to not reciprocate. There are a few reasons why this series of pleasure giving is often not reciprocated. The first reason is because of women s socially identified passivity. In discourse s privileged pleasure act vaginal penetration by a 27 Ibid., Irigaray, Women on the Market, Catherine A. MacKinnon, Sexuality, in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 163.

12 penis, which ends in semen emission the woman effectively plays no role. The penis penetrates her passive vagina and, in contrast, to the phallic jouissance, yet her jouissance does not impart anything on the other. Moreover, if she is passive, then it is not her giving to the man, but the man pleasuring himself with the available options. Second, in opposition to the erogenous female body: it is by virtue of its visibility that the penis, the phallic organ, is privileged in the act of sexual copulation. 30 The penis and its orgasm are both visible activities, which privileges and realizes them. Conversely, the woman s jouissance is not visible and language lacks the ability to describe it. These first two explanations for why women do not receive reciprocation deal with the privileging of man over discourse. As for the final reason, in order to completely explain men s non-reciprocity of pleasure, we must recall that women are marked as commodities. Because women do not own their own bodies, Irigaray states that, Neither as mother nor as virgin nor as prostitute has woman any right to her own pleasure. 31 Because women s jouissance is not explicitly visible, she is labeled as passive and has no claim to her own pleasure; discourse does not communicate the same need to reciprocate pleasure as it does with other gifting relations. The reverse, and far scarier, side of women s passivity and lack of claim to their own pleasure is the discursive treatment of rape. Because the woman s experience is not ever described, Whatever it takes to make a penis shudder and stiffen with the experience of its potency is what sexuality means culturally...all this suggests that what is called sexuality is the dynamic of control by which male dominance in forms that range from intimate to insti- 30 Winnubst, Exceeding Hegel and Lacan: Different Fields of Pleasure within Foucault and Irigaray, Irigaray, Women on the Market, 185.

13 tutional, from a look to a rape. 32 If the woman cannot speak her pleasure, likewise she cannot speak what is not pleasure to her. Moreover, her pleasure is discursively fused with the man s desire, so if he desires, then she must as well. Finally, because she is commodified, a man can come to believe she belongs to him and so her body is possessed by him, which can also result in rape. In the summer of 2013, radios and clubs around the world featured the song Blurred Lines, which explicitly regards women as discursively passive, while understanding their desire to be identical to the desire the man projects. Robin Thicke croons, If you can t hear what I m trying to say/if you can t read from the same page/maybe I m going deaf. Thicke privileges his words, and the woman s words become unrepresented because maybe I m going deaf. Thicke continues to project his desire, But you re an animal, baby, it s in your nature/just let me liberate you...i know you want it. The woman s nature is animalistic, but the man s liberation allows her to become intelligible through giving to him. Furthermore, the man knows despite being deaf to the woman s words and pleasure that she wants it because he does; his pleasure is synonymous with hers. A woman s inability to be a desiring, active subject has many repercussions that builds to constitute rape culture. Discursive signifiers trap women in a heterosexual identity where she has less of a claim to her body than others do. However, Irigaray explains that clearly women are always in excess of this identity. Language is not a fixed, ontological structure; even though through its deployment, discourse and power make the illusion that words are truth claims. In the signifier woman : The value of a woman always escapes: black continent, hole 32 Mackinnon, Sexuality, 165.

14 in the symbolic, breach in discourse. 33 Outside of discourse, the phallus does not exist, and a woman is not a commodity she is active, she desires. Lesbian relations demonstrate the dual nature of women being commodified and women being active, desiring givers. Between the two women, the ability to appropriate the other through the phallogocentric discourse does not exist. Moreover, the women actively give to each other, in direct discord with their signified identities. Because the phallogocentric gaze is not presently putting the two partners into a hierarchy, the women, in their excess, enter into relation between two subjects. At the same time, phallogocentrism, because of its omnipresence, still defines the relationships from its abstract, impersonal conditions. Because lesbian relationships pose a real threat to discourse s center, they are judged and regulated all the more harshly from the public s perspective. In any relation from marriage to sex, even in lesbian relationships, the woman is rendered incapable of desire and activity. A lesbian relationship is made coherent with discourse insofar as it is recognized only to the extent that it is prostituted to man s fantasies, because commodities can only enter into relationships under the watchful eyes of their guardians. 34 Lesbian encounters are discursively allowed in a voyeuristic sense as long as a man can watch through pornography, the classic trope of two girls kissing at a party, or can fantasize about it in his mind. All of these situations still allow the man to be the active one, or at least the recipient of pleasure giving by being a third party voyeur. Phallocentrism still lets the man claim these commodified instances as his own sexual, pleasuring experience rather than 33 Irigaray, Women on the Market, Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 196.

15 the woman s experience. However, some lesbian relationships do pose a threat to discourse, by the assertion that as soon as she desires (herself), as soon as she speaks (expresses herself, to herself), a woman is a man. 35 The homosexual woman is diagnosed with a masculinity complex, or in common terms labeled butch, if she desires a woman. On one level, the lesbian relationship is always in excess of discourse. At the same time, the public reclaims these discontinuous events as being given for a man so that they do not escape or disrupt the signified identity woman. While there will always be exceptions to the rule, discourse renders it nearly impossible for a woman and a man to enter into an equally reciprocal marriage, sexual encounter, or anything intimate, because they will always lie in an asymmetrical relation to each other. In the current phallogocentric discourse, two main problems stand in the way of a possible structure under which a socially identified man and woman could enter a relationship. First, phallogocentric discourse does not allow space for woman to speak herself or her desire. Second, as long as men have rights to the commodified bodies of women that women do not have, gift exchange will be near impossible due to the danger of being possessed. If it is through discourse that these exclusions and commodifications derive from, Irigaray blatantly points out that, What remains to be done, then, is to work at destroying the discursive mechanism. 36 For the liberation of women, the key to disrupting discursive oppression is decentering the phallogocentrism of discourse: [T]hroughout philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse in the western tradition, there is only one 35 Ibid., Ibid., 76.

16 kind of desiring subject the phallic...this phallic power is the power to distinguish, to delineate, to demarcate, to centralize, and to control the proper names of objects and values in the world; it is the power to reduce all non-phallic structures to controlled negations that continually support i.e., mirror the dominance of the phallic economy. 37 The history of discourse encompassed the activity and desire based on who has the phallus the man. If the phallogocentric nature of discourse was disrupted, having the phallus would not reduce women to controlled negations of the phallus that reflects its power back upon it. The difficult question becomes how to create a discontinuity in discourse that could decenter the phallus as the ultimate force of desire and speech. Because the privileging of the phallus is the heart of feminine oppression, theoretical approaches to feminism mainly focus on the nature of discourse and the possibility of de-centering its phallocentrism. In this light, Irigaray emphasizes the necessity of reopening the figures of philosophical discourse idea, substance, subject, transcendental subjectivity, absolute knowledge in order to pry out of them what they have borrowed that is feminine, from the feminine, to make them render up and give back what they owe the feminine. 38 Discourse has restrained women s identities and taken from them. In my interpretation of Irigaray s This Sex Which Is Not One so far, I have stayed within her framework of the discursive binary: men and women. Irigaray operates from the following perspective It is not a matter of toppling that order so as to replace it that amounts to the same thing 37 Winnubst, Exceeding Hegel and Lacan: Different Fields of Pleasure within Foucault and Irigaray, Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 74.

17 in the end but of disrupting and modifying it, starting from an outside that is exempt, in part, from phallocratic law. 39 Irigaray argues that women must mimic her place in discourse in order to reveal her excess. Women s excess, for Irigaray, is not accessed by a fantastical abandoning of phallogocentric discourse and desire. On the contrary, That elsewhere of feminine pleasure can be found only at the price of crossing back through the mirror that subtends all speculation...it refers all these categories and ruptures back to the necessities of the self-representation of phallic desire in discourse. A playful crossing, and an unsettling one, which would allow woman to rediscover the place of her self-affection. 40 The strategic essentialism of Irigaray s approach causes there to be something inherently subversive when a woman, necessarily imperfectly, inhabits her signified identity. A little over ten years later, Judith Butler published Gender Trouble, which adds a new layer to Irigaray s discussion of the feminine identity. Irigaray s goal does not include deconstructing the main binary, man/woman, to its full extent. Her imagination of women s liberation exists still within these signifiers, which inevitably would continue to categorize people and leave their excess unintelligible. Feminism, at that point in the discussion, had simply not yet queered the genders far enough, and so Butler commends her, Irigaray clearly broadens the scope of feminist critique by exposing the epistemological, ontological, and logical structures of a masculinist signifying economy. 41 While Irigaray recognized and problematized the ontological nature of the signifier woman, she still operated from the idea that there are 39 Ibid., Ibid., Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 18.

18 men and women, where women are the oppressed sex of the two. Irigaray writes that what will be returned to women, when discourse is modified, will be feminine. She does not tackle the problem that sex is always unavoidably marked and gendered and therefore, remains within the phallogocentric sex/gender system. However, Butler changes the language regarding the violence of discursive identities. The recent trend in progressive language separates identity into sex and gender, where gender is a free-floating artifice and sex is the biological division between males and females. Butler troubles this and says: Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of men will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that women will interpret only female bodies...there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. 42 This is similar to Irigaray, who sees women always in excess of the signifier woman, and as the book titles, women are This Sex Which Is Not One. Butler expands on this phenomenon and identifies that there is a radical discontinuity between the signifier and the signified for man and woman. The discrepancy is so large that gender becomes something entirely meaningless outside the social. Furthermore, unlike the common belief that there are natural differences and stereotypes that follow, Butler changes the conversation: This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect 42 Ibid., 9.

19 of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender. 43 Gender comes before sex discursively, which constitutes both as historically and socially constructed. Man and woman as signifiers are free-floating artifices that have no natural, fixed signifieds. 44 Butler changes Irigaray s conversation so that it is not the matter of women reclaiming themselves, but troubling the categories of sex/gender in order to exist as more than a restrained identity. Butler s insights do not upturn Irigaray s goal to [destroy] the discursive mechanism, or invalidate her analysis of women in discourse. Rather, Butler simply broadens the view of what needs to be destroyed so that socially marked women are not commodified. In the way discourse acts today, woman and man exist as discursive characters, but no one person actually is man or woman. Both men and women are trapped and constrained by these ideal identities, and cannot explore their excess. 45 Under the signifier of woman, people who have bodily traits considered feminine are identified as women and, as a result, abstracted and commodified. As stated before, the woman is always more than this commodified signifier though. Irigaray writes: (Re-)discovering herself, for a woman, thus could only signify the possibility of sacrificing no one of her pleasures to another, of identifying herself with none of them in particular, of never being simply one. A sort of expanding universe to which no limits could be fixed and which would not be incoherence nonetheless nor that polymorphous perversion of the child in which the erogenous zones 43 Ibid., Ibid., Cixous, Sorties, 154.

20 would lie waiting to be regrouped under the primacy of the phallus. 46 Irigaray sees the people labeled under the signifier woman, herself among them, as always located elsewhere in the discursive machinery. Irigaray then fantasizes about a world in which children, the unmarked, were not organized around the phallus in discourse. Irigaray believes that if woman can be re-signified, the possession and exploitation of women would cease. However, in an ideal way, I believe that a radical de-centering and upheaval of the words man and woman are needed altogether. In turn, this would also rid discourse of the hierarchical roles of man, woman, and the unintelligible. The unintelligible would no longer be a censored, prohibited area of habitation for people in discourse. Correlatively, the phallogocentric gaze would not exist, so it could not categorize people into man and woman upon instinct. Irigaray only focused on destroying parts of the system for the benefit of the people categorized as women. However, in conjunction with Butler s analysis of discourse, Irigaray s goal to reclaim the excess that discourse has taken must be re-interpreted to be the upheaval of the sex/gender system entirely. For a woman and a man to give equally in a heterosexual relation, discourse must not automatically place them in different power and activity positions. Still decades later, Irigaray s analysis of the woman s place in discourse holds true. From the starting point of the present, Irigaray demonstrates that documented western society has always, and still, relies on the commodification and exploitation of women. Discourse calls man and woman to be each other s counterpart and give love, time, energy, children, and pleasure to one another. However, because 46 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 29.

21 the heterosexual pair never have equal discursive access and the woman is commodified, gift giving between the two is almost always doomed to be poorly reciprocated. Moreover, the woman herself is vulnerable to become part of the exchange; her discursive identity commodifies her. As a result of her hierarchal place and commodified body, socially identified women are de-privileged; they are ogled, raped, compared, owned, and even bought. Irigaray imagines a world in which women have reclaimed themselves where: Nature s resources would be expended without depletion, exchanged without labor, freely given, exempt from masculine transactions: enjoyment without a fee, well-being without pain, pleasure without possession. As for all the strategies and savings, the appropriations tantamount to theft and rape, the laborious accumulation of capital, how ironic all that would be. 47 Irigaray dreams about giving relations and structures where the woman is not vulnerable to being possessed, and moreover, she would be acting as an autonomous agent, not phallic capital. Irigaray sees that if women can discursively reclaim what privileged men and discourse has taken from them, then they would not be commodified. While Irigaray is not necessarily wrong, she does not go the extra step and recognize that liberation from these structures is not just matter of re-signifying woman. Rather, a complete overturning of the discursive sex/gender system is necessary. The sex signifiers work to naturalize people s bodies as bifurcately different and hierarchized. Furthermore, discourse simultaneously makes 47 Ibid., 197

22 anyone who is not categorically heterosexually man or woman unintelligible, and therefore, must be reclaimed or ostracized in a manner by discourse. For example, lesbian relationships are discursively threatening to this system, so the phallogocentric gaze reifies them for men s fantasies. While it may be true that in an ideal world heterosexual relationships exist in a reciprocal giving operation, we cannot imagine that world. The signifiers themselves would effectively need to become meaningless, which would coincide with a collapse of compulsory heterosexuality as well. The romanticized giving in heterosexual relations is stained by the violent, hierarchal division between man and woman. Unless an entire discontinuity in discourse occurs, the signifiers man and woman will always create an irreconcilable, asymmetrical relationship between the two. Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre. Selections from The Logic of Practice and Marginalia. In The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, edited by Alan D. Schrift, New York, NY: Routledge, Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York, NY: Routledge, Cixous, Hélène. Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays. In The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, edited by Alan D. Schrift, New York, NY: Routledge, Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality - Volume 1: An Introduction. New York, NY: Random House, Inc Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Irigaray, Luce. Women on the Market. In The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, edited by Alan D. Schrift, New York, NY: Routledge, 1997.

23 Kopelman, Richard E., Rita J. Shea-Van Fossen, Eletherios Paraskevas, Leanna Lawter, and David J. Prottas. The Bride Is Keeping Her Name: A 35-Year Retrospective Analysis of Trends and Correlates. Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal 37, no. 5 (2009): Mackinnon, Catherine A. Sexuality. In The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, edited by Linda J. Nicholson New York, NY: Routledge, Rubin, Gayle. The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex. In The Second Sex: A Reader in Feminist Theory, edited by Linda Nicholson. New York, NY: Routledge, Winnubst, Shannon. Exceeding Hegel and Lacan: Different Fields of Pleasure within Foucault and Irigaray. Hypatia 14, no. 1 (1999):