ABSTRACT
We have already seen that Plato's directive that women should not be imitated and that Lacan's assertion that there The woman does not exist, are each challenged by Luce Irigaray; and that she uses the prospect of a feminine divine as her way of making the challenge. The making of a feminine divine involves the concurrent development of a feminine-feminine symbolic/imaginary, but we need to pause here to see precisely what that might involve. Morny Joy has pointed out that Luce Irigaray's mimesis is a productive recon®guring (Joy, 1990). Luce Irigaray's is not imitation simpliciter, as we have already seen in the way she poses the question of a feminine divine: the divine which will emerge together with a femininefeminine symbolic/imaginary offers an aspirational ideal for women, which is focused around af®rming the female body. So I shall begin this chapter by taking a brief but closer look at Luce Irigaray's practice of mimesis as both the productive and de(con)structive project that it is.
