5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
the masculine subject, and thus can never escape the domination of a rigidly
genderized discourse.
In opposition to Lacan, however, a number of French feminists have recently
sought to articulate an alternative vision of female sexual subjectivity in French
psychoanalysis. This approach to revaluing the feminine is generally referred to as
post-Lacanian feminism, though it is worth briefly expanding on this label. This
branch of feminist psychoanalysis is generally considered ‘Lacanian’ because
theorists associated with it adopt a broadly structuralist interpretation of gender
categories, situating woman as the excluded Other of masculinist discourse and
culture. Yet this approach is also ‘anti-Lacanian’ since such theorists tend to oppose
the view that woman can only be defined as the mirror opposite of the masculine
subject, and thus never escape the domination of a rigidly genderized discourse.
Broadly speaking, post-Lacanian feminists evoke a positive image of femininity, an
image that underscores the multiple and plural dimensions of women’s sexuality.
Hélène Cixous, for example, speaks of the rhythms, flows, and sensations of the
feminine libidinal economy, contrasting this with the exaggerated masculinist stress
on genital sexuality. Woman, says Cixous, has the ‘capacity to depropriate unselfishly,
body without end, without appendage, without principal “parts” ... Her libido is
cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide’ (1976:95). Similarly, Luce Irigaray
locates the feminine in the multiplicity of bodily sensations arising from the lips,
vagina, clitoris, breasts. In contrast to the imperial phallic compulsiveness of male
sexuality, women’s capacity and need for sexual expression resides in the multiplicity
and flux of feminine desire itself. As Irigaray says of woman: ‘Her sexuality, always at
least double, is in fact plural’ (1977:102). Women, argues Irigaray, need to establish a
different relationship to feminine sexuality, establishing a range of displacements to
patriarchy through writing as a cultural practice. Speaking the feminine, for Irigaray,
can potentially transform the oppressive sexed identities of patriarchy. In her more
recent work, particularly An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993) and To Be Two (1999),
Irigaray situates the renegotiation of identities in the frame of ethics, specifically the
dilemma of recognizing the Otherness of the other sex. An ethics of sexual difference,
she argues, would respect the Other in her or his own right, with regard to
considerations of finitude, mortality, creation and the divine.
Finally, we can find another meeting point of feminist and psychoanalytic theories in
the work of Kristeva, who elaborates the idea of a specifically feminine mode of being
which dislocates patriarchal language and culture. In Revolution in Poetic Language
(1974), Kristeva contrasts the Lacanian symbolic, the Law which the father embodies,
with the multiple libidinal forces of the ‘semiotic’. The semiotic is a realm of