Irigaray, Luce - Maggie Berg (essay date autumn 1991)
Maggie Berg (essay date autumn 1991)
SOURCE: Berg, Maggie. “Luce Irigaray's ‘Contradictions’: Poststructuralism and Feminism.” Signs 17, no. 1 (autumn 1991): 50-70.
[In the following essay, Berg proposes an ironic reading of “When Our Lips Speak Together,” situating Irigaray's “lips” metaphor as a counterpart to Lacan's “phallus” metaphor.]
The work of Luce Irigaray is regarded by many feminists as riven with contradictions: she is a poststructuralist and a Lacanian insofar as she believes that the subject is a discursive construct, making identity unstable; but, in order to rescue women from what she sees as the repressive effects of phallocentrism, she apparently proposes an alternative feminine discourse modeled on the female genitals.1 Irigaray's “lips” have become the basis of debate: those critics (including Plaza, Jones, Moi, Burke) who regard her work as naive (it suggests the possibility of a...
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