ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Luce Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference in order to assess how she reconstructs "the [gendered] subject" within a field of reciprocal intersubjective relations without falling prey to her own critiques of universalist or essentialist subjectivity. By means of her multiple analogues for gendered (inter)subjectivities—the chiasmus, the atom, the mechanics of fluids, the copula, the touching lips—Irigaray delineates encounters among subjects who perceive and articulate their differences and similarities only in contact with one another and with the multiple aspects of themselves. In other words, for Irigaray, subjectivity is constructed by a complex dialectic between a predetermined discursive field and the specific dynamic relations among and "within" embodied subjects. Much as in Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's example, rather than erecting rigid hierarchies among various cultural markers, Irigaray's flexible ethics of intersubjectivity allows for the multiple differences among and within subjects to be manifested both individually and in their social relations.
