Luce Irigaray was born in Blaton, Belgium. Not much is known about her upbringing and personal life because she believes that revealing details in the male-dominated academic establishment was usually used to challenge and criticize the works of women. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Catholic University of Leuven and later worked as a high school teacher in Brussels. In 1960, at 30, she moved to Paris to further her education, receiving a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Paris VIII in 1968. Her dissertation, an attempt to establish the grammar of dementia patients, was the basis of her first book Le Langage des déments, published in 1973. During the 1960s, she studied to become a psychoanalyst at Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic seminars at the École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris). She then held a research position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Centre for Scientific Research). Combining her knowledge in both psychology and linguistics, she researched gender differences in language and concluded that speech is never neutral but always marked by sexual differences. In 1974, Irigaray published her second doctoral thesis, Speculum of the Other Woman, criticizing the roots of Western psychoanalysis. In this pioneering text, she argued that because Freud always used a boy as his paradigm of psychosexual development, the masculine was the norm, and girls and women got reduced to being inferior to males and functioned as commodities. She also claimed that in a culture where the line of descent goes from father to son, whose symbolism takes no account of the mother-daughter line, women do not exist as women but only as mothers subordinate to a patriarchal order, preferably as the mothers of sons. Her work received much criticism from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and she got dismissed from her teaching positions at the University of Vincennes. In 1977, she published the book This Sex Which is Not One, arguing that in a phallic-centered economy, women were a commodity because all forms of transactions were done and managed only between men. She played on the two meanings of “One” in the book title. The female was not sex because women got demoted to being nothing more than inferior men and did not exist in their own right, and the sex of women was not one because it was not reducible to one organ as men. In 1982, at 52, Irigaray began to serve as head of the Philosophy department at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. There, she worked on research that resulted in her 1984 book, An Ethics of Sexual. The book, in which she stated that Western culture is unethical because of gender discrimination, established her as an influential continental philosopher. She is also considered to be one of “The French Feminism,” together with the philosopher Helen Helene Cixous and others. Over the following decades, in addition to giving seminars and lectures throughout Europe, Irigaray continued to explore the differences between men’s and women’s languages. Through this research, she discovered a correlation between the language of men and women and the suppression of female thought and that gendered language patterns indicate subjectivity in women and male dominance. Her later work delved into the possibility of creating a female imagination that would allow women to speak as women and not as “lesser to men” and incorporate utopian speculation about possible ethics of sexual differences, in which she implied a recognition of a distinct male and female psychosexual economics that can coexist without one being reduced to the other. Read more...