class note based on 24 February 2014

Sneha Susan John

1324150

Luce Irigaray is a well-known writer in contemporary French feminism and philosophy. Her writing usually deals between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and linguistics. She critiques the rejection of women from both philosophy and psychoanalytic theory and projects women sexuality which is not one. She speaks of language and science that are built by a phallocentric society and thereby critiques their notions.

“The sex which is not one” is a text dealing with violation of the woman’s body but it can also be looked at as describing the woman’s body in a way in which most women have not understood. She has given a critical approach to the traditional ideas of sexuality. According to the patriarchal society’s perception, the women’s sexual organs are considered a lack of the penis and the vagaina in no way over power the male organs. Women’s sexuality according to norms has been that which receives a man’s desires.

Irigaray projects the idea of female sexuality that contradicts general patriarchal ideas. She discusses autoeroticism, where a woman derives satisfaction through natural means where she does not need external objects to do so.

“This autoeroticism is disrupted by a violent break-in: the brutal separation of the two lips by a violating penis, an intrusion that that distracts and deflects the woman …. “

Irigaray points out that when there is a sexual act through penetration of the male into female vagaina, there is a destruction of female sexuality. The idea here seems to provoke lesbianism as the separation of the vagaina by a penis is considered a violent break-in, something that exploits the sexuality of women.

 The essay contradicts the idea that female sexuality is one that complements the male desires. She critiques the thought of Freud and Lacan who discusses womanhood as the significance of the difference between male and female sex organs and also the experience of erotic desire in men and women. She also discusses the linguistic character of sexual difference like Lacan and intensely disagrees with his depiction of the Symbolic order as historical and static.

A part of the title, not one brings out the plurality of sexuality in a woman. She deals with Freud’s understanding of the female sexuality which is considered a lack or none. She brings out the plurality of sexuality saying that the women have sex organs almost everywhere and breaks down the general notion of the lack. Irigaray makes it a point to bring out the feminine sexuality by presenting the body and eliminating the phallocentric perceptions of sexuality.

CLASS NOTES

Pearl Pallavi Sahu

1324142

Literary Criticism and Contemporary Theory

MEL 232

I MA English

24 February, 2014

Monday

Class Notes

The Sex which is Not One

The essay, ‘The Sex which is Not One’, was written by Luce Irigaray where she tries eliminating the notion of female sexuality always being conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters.

A person’s sexuality has always been an important aspect and the gender or sexuality has been dependent on the phallus of a person. It has always been considered that the penis is definite because it is visual and has a form while the vagina has no specific form and is indefinite. This causes the concept ‘lack’ for the women. This ‘lack’ causes the ‘penis envy’.

The very absence of the penis in a woman leads to the ‘penis envy’ which shows that the absence of the penis makes the woman realize that she is different from man and that is the reason she tends to long for it.  She tends to get closer to the male members in the family especially the father or husband to cover up for the lack by serving them. She lives with the desire of the male organ in some way or the other. It is after some time that she gets out of the so called Electra complex stage and starts looking outside family relations.

The concept of autoeroticism is the stage when the woman herself ‘touches herself’. The man to derive sexual pleasure from his own body needs external help such as hands or the woman’s body or anything else, while for a woman it just happens consciously but soon becomes an unconscious effort from the woman’s side. According to Irigaray, a woman can derive the pleasure from her own body because of what she calls the lips that are formed by her genitals. Their constant contact gives her a sexual pleasure which she cannot avoid. This is what autoeroticism is. She says that this autoeroticism is disrupted only by the violent break in of the penis into the vagina parting the lips from each other.

She says that in this world, a woman, more than being self-obliging, obliges man. In fact proving the ‘lack’, she accepts to the man giving herself totally in his hands for him to act upon her as he likes. With his presence she gets what is not hers. There is a sense of dependency on him to give him what he desire. But she will never tell him what she wants or in easier terms, she does not know what she wants. The woman longs for the missing organ. Hence, she is considered to be the imperfect man. Man identifies the pleasure with a woman to maternal relations. He associates it with the womb to establish his lost maternal connections and get the secrets of his origin.

The writer says that because she does not have a sexual form, even her language is different from that of man. Her language also is not definite and what she says cannot be made out clearly. Unlike that of man who speaks out straight like his definite sexuality. The sexual imaginary in a woman is more a less the obliging props of a man’s fantasies. Since she does not have a specific sexual organ, she is considered to have none. This puts her as not one nor two but as the other. She is also categorized as the plural because she really does not have to derive pleasure from just her vagina but every part of a woman’s body could let her derive sexual pleasure.

Hence, through the essay, the writer tries to show the other aspects of woman sexuality showing that she is not dependent on masculine norms.

 

References:

·   Nair, Shyam. "The Sex Which is Not One." 24 02 2014. Lecture.

·        http://media.wix.com/ugd/b7563b_0971a09fbd16425f81d72e4853ced8a9.pdf

 

 

 

Piyali Sarkar 1324143 (class notes)

Piyali Sarkar

1324143

MEL 232

Contemporary Critical Theory

Anil Pinto

24/02/2014

         

 

The Sex Which is Not One

 

Associated with feminism and psychoanalysis, Luce Irigaray is a remarkable cultural theorist best known for her work published in France through the 1970s. Psychoanalyst, linguist, and philosopher, Irigaray is concerned, particularly in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974, trans., 1985) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1977,trans., 1987), with exposing how Western discourse has effaced woman as the specular image of man. By contrast,

Irigaray carefully avoids enfolding her own ideas as "theory" to avoid an essentialism that will support patriarchalism. Irigaray was convinced that identity, if not fully then at least partly, was enacted in "self positioning in language".

 

Thus, she began to look for differences between the regular speech of men and hat of women: "it is not a question of biology determining speech, but of identity assumed in language within a particular symbolic system known as patriarchy, and as described by Jacques Lacan, in which the only possible subject position is masculine. Within this system, the only feminine identity available to a woman is that of a "defective" or "castrated" men; women are not symbolically

self-defined." Irigaray's thesis, put together in This Sex Which Is Not One, is that there might be a possibility of a different and non-masculine discourse. The following are the arguments presented by her:

1. Men are more likely to take up a subject position in language, to designate themselves as subjects of the discourse or action; women are more likely to efface themselves, to give precedence to men or to the world.

2. The use of the first person pronoun, I, by women, does not necessarily indicate a feminine identity.

3. Women are accustomed to being the vehicles of men's self-representation; their own self-representation in language is more or less absent.

4. Women are more likely to engage in dialogue; while men privilege the relation with the world and the object, women privilege interpersonal relations.

5. Women are not, as is sometimes thought, more emotional and subjective than men when they speak; their speech is likely to efface the expression of their subjectivity.

6. Women are less abstract than men, and are more likely to take account of context, they are also more likely to collaborate with the researcher and take research seriously.

 

Irigaray argues that the complexity of female sexuality and eroticism does not fit into male notions of sexuality. Irigray discovered women’s autoeroticism. In her autoeroticism, a woman is not “pleasure-giving” to men but “self-embracing” (This Sex Which is Not One 24). The autoeroticism could be a clue to overcome the logic of sameness in phallogocentric understanding of sexuality and its male God. The language she uses to describe this God comes from her account of morphology of women’s continual self-touching in the carelessness of two lips. God’s identity in trinity honors both self-love and relational wonder. Irigaray’s description of women’s autoeroticism helps to expand the conceptual horizons of Trinitarian thought. This God does not need an external other in order for there to be self-knowledge, for such knowledge is eternally generated through the relations of the Trinity. Such a God can relate to that which is truly ‘other’ than God, without reducing the other to a function of divine, narcissistic desire, as is the case in phallocetric conceptions of the Divine-human relation like the caress of two lips – always touching yet half open.

 

 

References:

·         Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One. Cornell University Press, 1985. Print.

·         Nair , Shyam. "The Sex Which is Not One ." 24 02 2014. Address.

 

[Notes of the lecture delivered on 24 February, 2014 at Christ University, prepared by Piyali Sarkar - I M.A. (ENG) -1324143]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Piyali Sarkar 1324143 (Class notes)

This Sex Which Is Not One

                                                                                                       This Sex Which Is Not One

 

       In her essay ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’, Luce Irigaray critiques the masculine notion of a woman’s sexuality and proposes a female sexuality which is self-referential and disconnected from "masculine parameters".

         From the early ages, a person’s sexuality has been defined by the presence of the phallus.  The penis is a visual object and the vagina is not. Hence it is considered as a ‘lack’, which gives birth to the concept of an imperfect man. The lack of penis in a woman creates an envy known as the ‘penis envy’. A woman’s affection towards her mother declines because she blames her for the lack of a penis.  To full fill her ‘lack’, she searches outside herself. This envy is the result of her affection towards her husband and father.  Her desire for the penis is later achieved by giving birth to a boy child.

        Talking about autoeroticism, Irigaray says that for a man to pleasure himself, he “needs an instrument: his hand, a woman’s body, language.” But for woman, “she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation.” “Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time,” Irigaray writes, “and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact”. By virtue of the biological constitution of her genitals, in other words, woman has a radically different pleasure/sexuality from man. Her autoeroticism according to Irigaray, “is disrupted by a violent break-in: the brutal separation of the two lips by a violating penis”. This, Irigaray continues, “distracts and deflects the woman from self-caressing from her “own pleasure,” which disappears in this intrusion, “the encounter with the totally other.”

        Next she talks about Western sexuality that has been laid down by man. It is based on the erection of the penis, the “thickness” of that “form,” the layering of its volume, its expansion and contraction and even the spacing of the moments in which it produces itself as form. She condemns man’s sexual imagery of woman as just a sexual object. A man’s desire of penetration into a woman’s vagina has two main reasons: to relive thoughts of his past about the mystery of the womb from where he entered this world; and also to establish his lost maternal connection. The penetration makes a woman submissive towards man. Also, she finds pleasure in being used as an object for sex.

         Unlike Laura Mulvey, Luce Irigaray does not believe that "we can begin to make a break for examining patriarchy with the tools it provides," but she does not seem to exclude completely the male cultural tradition.

Notes created by Reginald Valsalan (1324108)

Notes taken on 24-2-1014

Submitted 25-2-2014

 

Class Notes (1324127)

D. Hepzibah

1324127

MEL 232

Contemporary Critical Theory

Anil Pinto

24/02/2014

                       Luce Irigaray’s essay called “This Sex Which Is Not One” (1977) was summarized by Shyam Nair of I MA English. The title of the piece has two meanings. First, it refers to women’s sex as “lacking,” which she doesn’t believe, but in fact uses this piece to refute Freud’s analysis of women’s sex as missing the only desirable component. Second, it refers to her position that women do not have one sex; they have multiple sex organs all over their bodies, not to mention two lips that encompass our pleasure.

Perhaps the most crucial part of this essay is its first line: “Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters” (23).  If, as Irigaray claims, the penis is “the only sexual organ of recognized value” (23), then Woman is conceptualized in terms of her lack (as she references in both Freudian and Lacanian schemas).  To counter this, Irigaray instead posits a different understanding of female sexuality, one outside of a phallic economy: 

 

In order to touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a woman’s body, language…And this self-caressing requires at least a minimum of activity.  As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity….Thus, within herself, she is already two—but no divisible into one(s)—that caress each other. (24).

 

Within this schema, then, Irigaray characterizes penetration as “a violent break-in” (24).  Given the very differences in male sexuality and female sexuality, then, leads Iragaray to importantly conclude that, “Woman’s desire would not be expected to speak the same language as man’s” (25).  Irigaray’s conclusion here seems to align nicely with that of Hélène Cixous, whose “Laugh of the Medusa,” in which she posits “écriture feminine” as a women’s way of writing.  For Irigaray, because the Female Imaginary cannot be pinned down—as Woman’s sexuality is not one, is not even two, but is plural—so Woman’s language can

similarly be pinned down: “What she says is never identical with anything, moreover; rather, it is contiguous.  It touches (upon)” (29).

 

Critics of Irigaray accuse her of essentialism, and certainly, quite a few of her claims about female sexuality—such as, “Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking, and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity” (26).  Certainly, her recognition that “her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see” (26) within this dominant scopic economy is crucial.  Still, I have trouble accepting such a not only essentialist but heteronormative claim.  Further, while I have great appreciation for her recognition of female genitalia as being understood and defined in terms of lack, at times it seems as though she’s accepting this characterization as truth.  I also take issue with the essentialist position she seems to be taking in terms of the scopic economy, when she claims that, “Ownership and property are doubtless quite foreign to the feminine.  At lease sexually.  But not nearness….Woman derives pleasure from what is so near that she cannot have it, nor have herself” (31).  However, this is a very narrow view of ownership.  What about a schema of property and ownership that relies upon consumption, rather than penetration?  

 

What is important in this claim, though, is her correct observation that Woman is always already placed within this scopic economy, and it is this subjectivity as a commodity which Irigaray interrupts female pleasure: “How can this object of transaction claim a right to pleasure without removing her/itself from established commerce?” (32).  Irigaray, despite her tendency to veer towards an essentialist position, does acknowledge the fact that “women do not constitute, strictly speaking, a class, and their dispersion among several classes makes their political struggle complex, their demands sometimes contradictory” (32).  Irigaray seems dubious that any sort of equality is possible with men, as she sees any interactions as ultimately reverting to phallocratism.

Reference:

Nair, Shyam. Class Lecture. Twentieth Century Critical Traditions. 
Christ University. Bangalore, 
India. 24 Feb. 2013.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Print.

A magazine of woman’s creative art and activism, Her Circle, <http://www.hercircleezine.com/2012/04/18/luce-irigaray-female-sex/>

[Notes of the lecture delivered on 24 February, 2014 at Christ University, prepared by D. Hepzibah- I M.A. (ENG) -1324127]

 

Class Notes of 24 Feb 2014 (1324155)

Shyam Nair of I MA gave a summary of the essay The Sex Which Is Not One by Luce Irigaray. In her essay she constructs female and male sexuality and desire. He began by attempting to familiarise the class with the terms sex, penis and vagina.

The first topic was "construction of female through male language". Here, he talked about how male and female are seen by the society according to Irigaray. Since the earliest of times, presence of something has always been given more importance compared to the "absence" of something. Presence meant something positive, while absence was considered a bad thing. Penis, according to Irigaray has a proper defined visual form - hence it is "present". Vagina on the other hand does not have a clear form, hence it is "absent". Vagina becomes the passive entity, where the active penis is inserted. Therefore men assume the superior role when it comes to both the sexes. The woman becomes the lack, or the inferior one.

Then he spoke about the "penis envy". It refers to the theory of the female during her development when she realises she does not have a penis. Irigaray says that maybe it is at this point where the female begins distancing from her mother and gets closer to her father. She also attempts to get over the penis envy by conceiving a penis, or a male child.

Then the concept of autoeroticism was discussed. Woman are autoerotic since she does not require an external tool to pleasure herself, unlike man. The lips of the vagina are indefinitely in contact with each other, constantly rubbing against each other, pleasuring the woman. This according to Irigaray is the female sexuality.

He also spoke about the western sexual imaginary. The highly sexual is seen as the one with the hardest and largest erection, which is nothing but the male sexuality. Woman sexuality is absent or not seen by the society, and becomes a mere prop for the male genitals. When woman fulfils male desire, we are negating the womans desire, hence her sex is "none".

Class Notes

Nalini Narayani.S

1324139

24/02/2014

 

In her essay ‘A Sex Which is Not One’, Irigaray interestingly expounds on the sexuality of a woman , that she considers as plural,( “but woman has sex organs more or less everywhere”), having more than one or two pleasure centres, .”The lips” are constantly in contact with each other (nearness of the other) and therefore there is perpetual pleasure, yet she is not able to feel it for the nearness is too much to distinguish. The penis, by penetrating only violates this auto-eroticism and makes ‘her’ dependent on a man for pleasure, not of her own .

 

Men need an external object to masturbate, but woman needs nothing extraneous, is celebrated as her triumph as a sexual being. The violation of her womb is seen as being done ,as a means for the man to excavate into that space that gave birth to him ;the womb. He seems to be trying to get back to the origin of his existence that has been a mystery to him since discretion .

 It has also been said that she is the recipient of his pleasure and an abode to the phallus, as a substitute to the hand. There is anger at the general feeling that the woman’s sexuality is brought to nought during intercourse and seen as a passive receiver of male domination.

Penis envy, the woman’s lookout for a representing penis in her father, husband and as a last resort in her son were also discussed in class. As has been said in the essay the woman learns to caress herself by fondling the ‘Baby-Penis-Clitoris.’ The child becomes the medium through which the couple fondle and care, as if a part of them is there and the mother enjoys a free rein of touch in compensation to repressed female sexuality.

Irigaray sees only revolution as the solution to the problems of the woman in the exchange market of men. The need is to find herself and her kind !!!

 

 

The Feminist Tradition (1324137) Maya

What is realism ? Realism emerged as a movement in the late 1950s . In classical era common man not represented. They wanted to represent middle class society. The stories revolved around middle class families. There was a shift from previous writing. The claim was that a work of art was a representation of life, reality and nature. The idea of realism was introduced in India. Earlier this concept did not exist in India. They believed that through realistic mode you can represent life. Unified mode of representation. There was a coherent way in which setting , characters and language. One could not think beyond certain categories. Women writing autobiographical wanted to explore and express themselves. They wanted a place to represent their female consciousness. They believed in the concept of essence. They used realistic mode of representation.

There was a shift in the 20^th century in terms of women understanding their essence. Writers after 1950s did not want a realistic mode of representation. This is because you cannot go beyond certain categories. There was a subversion of traditional forms. They began to problematise gender construction. There was the experimentation with the form.

The Feminist Tradition.

Many women novelists were writing in the language of men during the 19^th century. There was the lack of a strong tradition. There were only a few women who wrote. These women came to represent all women. The minor writers were neglected. Another thing was that women writers did not bring sex to define their identity. Desexing in women's writing. They did not want to look at the role of gender. Experiences of only elite women were represented and not the ordinary women.

There are three phases. The first one being imitation and internalisation. How women adopt the values of the patriarchy system. The second phase was the protest phase. Women began to protest the standards set by the society. Third phase was called the female phase wherein they discovered their identity.

Women characters in women's writing do not enjoy the sense of freedom.they create male characters who are strong . This is so because the writer longs for

freedom. Woman characters portrayed as men . This was how women's writing was in the initial stages. They could not go beyond domestic space. They could not create female characters explicitly. In this phase they imitated the male writers. The protest phase was when feminism evolved. At this phase they moved to the next level. They moved on to fantasy. There was the emergence of group. Women were emotionally attached to other women. This gave rise to lesbianism . And this can be reflected in their writing. In the last phase they produced literature of their own during the 20^th century.

The Feminist Tradition