School of Social and Political Science

The Gender & Sexuality Studies Reading Group

The Gender and Sexuality Studies Reading Group is delighted to announce Deep Dive 2023!

The Deep Dive is a series of 8 events, held over 6 weeks, designed to acquaint (or re-acquaint) academic staff and PGR students with the seminal works of a particularly notable feminist scholar. Deep Dives represent an unparalleled opportunity for time strapped academics to develop thoroughgoing and critical insights into feminist theory.

This year we will be exploring the work of Luce Irigaray, a French-Belgian feminist philosopher and author of multiple books including Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993) and The Way of Love (2002). Irigaray’s expansive oeuvre, which challenges the masculine character of western philosophical traditions and critically engages with the concept of sexual difference, offers a range of methods for transforming contemporary cultures. These methods include strategic essentialism, utopianism, and novel language.   

Our exploration of Irigaray’s work will take place through lectures and a reading list, delivered and curated by Professor Mary Rawlinson. Professor Rawlinson is a Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London and Emerita Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University in New York. Rawlinson’s publications include The Betrayal of Substance: death, literature, and sexual difference in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Columbia University Press, 2021), Just Life: bioethics and the future of sexual difference (Columbia University Press, 2016), Engaging the World: Thinking After Irigaray (SUNY, 2016), Thinking with Irigaray (SUNY, 2011), and Derrida and Feminism (Routledge, 1997). Her next book Liminal Justice investigates the idea of justice in crime fiction. Rawlinson was the founding editor of IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (2006-2016) and Co-founder and Director of The Irigaray Circle (2007-2017). 

The Luce Irigaray Deep Dive will be run online and in person. An introductory lecture will take place online, and a concluding lecture and specialist paper will be delivered in person. In addition, attendees will be able to register for either in-person reading groups or online reading groups. Please note, the online reading groups will only run if there is sufficient demand.

Contact Dr Rebecca Hewer if you have any questions: rebecca.hewer@ed.ac.uk.

Upcoming lectures requiring registration

  • Thursday 6 July - Concluding Lecture - Registration via Eventbrite
  • Friday 7 July -  Opening Hegel’s Autological Circle: Irigaray and the Metaphysics of Sexual Difference - Registration via Eventbrite

Reading Group Schedule

  • Thursday 15 June - Reading Group 3
  • Thursday 22 June - Reading Group 4
  • Thursday 29 June - Reading Group 5

Reading list created by Professor Mary Rawlinson.

Introductory Lecture: Luce Irigaray’s Philosophy of Sexual Difference

This lecture will provide an introduction to the key concepts and themes of Luce Irigaray’s philosophy:  sexual difference as ontological difference; the critique of the logic of the one or the same; how “man” has attempted to “give the universe his gender;” the sensible transcendent and lateral transcendence;  the claim that human nature is ‘at least’ two; the link between the exploitation of nature and the subjection of women;  the critique of the “unconditional power of money” and the commodification of life; the critique of equality and the need to rethink ethics and politics in light of sexual difference;  and the role of language, literature, and art in political life. Irigaray aims at a more “livable future” and a “different way of standing on the earth together.”  Her philosophical corpus is animated by the question of community: how is it possible to generate the solidarities that make collective action possible, while safeguarding the singularity of each and all? 

Week 1: Irigaray’s Critique of the Logic of the One

39 pages

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman: New Edition. Translated by Gillian Gill, Cornell University Press, 1985.

  • “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the ‘Masculine’”
  • “The Eternal Irony of the Community”
  • “Volume-Fluidity”
Week 2: The Idea of a Sensible Transcendental

42 pages

Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Cornell University Press, 1993.

  • “Sexual Difference”
  • “Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, ‘Diotima’s Speech’”
  • “An Ethics of Sexual Difference”
Week 3: Social Justice/Sexual Justice

38 pages

Irigaray, Luce. Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference. 1st edition, Routledge, 2007.

  • “A Personal Note: Equal or Different”
  • “The Neglect of Female Genealogies”
  • “The Culture of Difference”
  • “The Right to Life”
  • “Why Define Sexed Rights?”
Week 4: Human Nature Is At Least Two

43 pages

Irigaray, Luce. I Love to You: Sketch of A Possible Felicity in History. 1st edition, Routledge, 1996.

“Human Nature is Two” “Donning a Civil Identity”

 

Irigaray, Luce. Democracy Begins Between Two. First Edition, the Athlone Press, 2000.

“Refounding the Family on a Civil Basis” “A Two Subject Culture”

 

Week 5: Lateral Transcendence and The Question of Community: How Is It Possible to Build the Solidarities That Make Collective Action Possible, While Protecting the Singularity of Each and All?

136 pages

Irigaray, Luce. Sharing the World. Continuum, 2008.

Concluding Session: Questioning Irigaray

This concluding session will focus on the questions that have arisen in the course of the reading group. Participants will be asked to generate a list of questions to be discussed.