Back to the Market: Extending Irigaray's Reading of Marx

Luce Irigaray’s work is widely recognized and she is a main voice in the post-1968 French feminism. In her texts, she reconsiders the question of the feminine and of female sexuality in philosophy and psychoanalysis in order to dispute the male-centered discourse and hegemony. The main context that she works within is philosophy and psychoanalysis, and her approach is predominantly deconstructive. Irigaray’s mission is thus in exposing the inconsistencies and flaws in the phallocentric discourse. To this end, Irigaray employs what Moi calls a “mimetic technique” that “becomes a conscious acting out of the hysteric (mimetic) position allocated to all women under patriarchy” . Irigaray’s approach is predominantly deconstructive and thus, it is undermining to the dominant discourse but she, as Schwab affirms about her (Irigaray’s) reading of Freud, “mimics … not only to deconstruct but also to open … [the] text up for further inquiry” . This “opening up” of inquiry is true to the different places in her work in which she brings the Marxist analysis into play (which most of her interpreters fail to mention or address sufficiently). Here she opens up “a path of inquiry left unexplored by Freud (the material conditions that produce so-called normal femininity)” . The most famous example of Irigaray’s use of Marxist theory is the article “Women on the Market” from This Sex Which Is Not One. In this article, she provides an astute reading of Marx and shows that the subjection of woman has been institutionalized by her reduction to an object of economic exchange.