ABSTRACT
One of Julia Kristeva's most articulate contemporaries is Luce Irigaray, who is also a psychoanalyst, philosopher and feminist theorist. Given her training in Lacanian psychoanalysis and her interest in Saussurian, structuralist and poststructuralist linguistics and language , her position seems close to and compatible with Kristeva's understanding of sexual difference. Indeed, both are commonly described as feminists of sexual difference. Yet, as outlined in the last two chapters, Kristeva's understanding of sexual difference entails the dissolution of all sexual identities and converts the feminist aspiration of establishing an identity for women into a dispersed process of sexual differentiation relevant to both sexes. This chapter examines Irigaray's earlier works, those published before 1979, particularly Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1985b), to see what is at stake in her disagreements with Kristeva.
