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In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray elaborates on some of the major themes of Speculum of the Other Woman, her landmark work on the status of women in Western philosophical discourse and in psychoanalytic theory. In eleven acute and widely ranging essays, Irigaray reconsiders the question of female sexuality in a variety of contexts that are relevant to current discussion of feminist theory and practice. Among the topics she treats are the implications of the thought of Freud and Lacan for understanding womanhood and articulating a feminine discourse; classic views on the significance of the difference between male and female sex organs; and the experience of erotic pleasure in men and in women. She also takes up explicitly the question of economic exploitation of women; in an astute reading of Marx she shows that the subjection of woman has been institutionalized by her reduction to an object of economic exchange. Throughout Irigaray seeks to dispute and displace male-centered structures of language and thought through a challenging writing practice that takes a first step toward a woman's discourse, a discourse that would put an end to Western culture's enduring phallocentrism.

Making more direct and accessible the subversive challenge of Speculum of the Other Woman, this volume -- skillfully translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke -- will be essential reading for anyone seriously concerned with contemporary feminist issues.

About the Author

Luce Irigaray, a trained psychoanalyst, holds two doctorates, one in linguistics and one in philosophy. The publication of Speculum of the Other Woman in 1974 provoked the wrath of the Lacanian faction, leading to her expulsion from the Freudian School and from her teaching position at Vincennes

Psychoanalysis and Lucan are all early Postmodernist vocabulary. Remember psychoanalysis coming to America peaching allot of German thinking through Adler Jung, Jaspers etal.

Psychoanalysis was a religion and philosophy but very dangerous. The ego and subconscious were concepts cooped by Freud from a whole foundation of German Philosophy.

last time I noticed, a building, pipe, pipe support, or pump really doesn't give a da*m about who designed it, who bought it, or who turned the switch.

Male, female, or neutral. Gay, straight, or unknown.

It will do exactly as it was BUILT, with the fluid and power available. And any jerk of a feminist that thinks she can predict turbulent flow would b emaking a hell of a lot more as an engineer than a collge prof.

Except as an engineer, she'd have to show that her theorirs really worked.

As a college prof, she fill her mouth with any bulls*it she prefers.

And no one will be the wiser. Because her critics are obviously as stupid, vain, and ill-educated as she is.