Sexes and Genealogies - Paperback

by Luce Irigaray (Author), Gillian Gill (Translator)

In the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray is one of France's most versatile feminist critics. Sexes and Genealogies, a collection of lectures delivered throughout Canada and Europe, introduces her writing to a wider American audience.

Irigaray's most famous work, Speculum of the Other Woman, prompted her expulsion from the Lacanin Ecole Freudienne because of its searing depiction of Platonic and Freudian representations of women. Now Sexes and Genealogies analyzes sexual difference according to what she terms the double dimension of gender and ideology.

Irigaray covers major issues in religion, the law, psychoanalysis, and literature, such as: the continued neglect by psychoanalysts of the sexual and gender dimensions of therapy, the urgency of female divinity for contemporary feminist movements, and a reconsideration of women's relation to the market economy. Sexes and Genealogies also includes Irigaray's dazzling reading of the Oresteia, "Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother," now acknowleged as a feminist classic.

Author Biography

Luce Irigaray (PhD, Linguistics, Philosophy, University of Paris VII, certification, Ecole Freudienne de Paris) is Director of Research in Philosophy at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique. Many of her works have been translated into English, including most notably An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Cornell, 1993), Between East and West (Columbia, 2002), Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (Columbia, 1991), Sexes and Genealogies (Columbia, 1993), Speculum of the Other Woman (Cornell, 1985), and This Sex Which Is Not One (Cornell, 1985).