ABSTRACT
The female homosexual is introduced as an important nodal point in Irigaray's strategies of resistance. Female homosexuality recalls the pharmakon that is, as Derrida outlines in "Plato's Pharmacy," the "'medicine', th[e] philter, which acts as both remedy and poison." It is female homosexuality as pharmakon which renders Irigaray's argument (im)possible. Since the operation between the terms of the first two pairs has been discussed at length above, it remains to consider how the last two pairs are deployed in Irigaray's text, and in particular how they coagulate about the notion of female homosexuality as the indispensable stages of an emancipated sexuality and subjectivity. In an attempt to rescue a phallocentrically specularized femininity, Irigaray projects her desire for a genuine femininity onto female homosexuality, inscribing thereon the qualities of exteriority and a desire for the same. It is, ultimately and inevitably, the pharmakon, the remedy and the poison both.
