Over the last decades, sexually explicit images and the adoption of a “porn look” have become prevailing in Western culture and entail an increasing (self)-objectification of women. Critical reflections on this trend rely on ground-breaking work developed by feminist scholars since the 1970s. Luce Irigaray’s work ‘This sex which is not one’ (This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 23-33, 1985) has had a major impact in this regard. In her criticism of psychoanalytic discourse she has highlighted how feminine sexuality is subjected to masculine parameters. What is required for the practice of masculine sexuality determines the way of conceiving of sexuality, which leaves women in a state of dependency, being objects that want to be appropriated and consumed by men. In her text ‘“Frenchwomen” stop trying’ (This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 198-204, 1985), Irigaray has also elucidated the impact of pornography. While woman actually has nothing to say in the pornographic scene and only has to give herself over, she appears to have the leading role. In this exclusively phallocratic sexual economy, her enjoyment is never for her own sake but acts as a proof of masculine power. Even women’s mutual enjoyment ought to happen under a masculine watchful look. Irigaray has not only questioned feminine sexual objectification, she has also elaborated features specific to feminine sexuality. ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ (This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 205-218, 1985) is a highly original text which tells about feminine sexuality in a poetic language. Touch and self-affection are predominant themes in Irigaray’s thinking. In her view, woman’s pleasure has more to do with touch than with sight, a touch that is plural and cannot be captured in the activity-passivity dichotomy. Since woman’s genitals are composed of two lips in continuous contact, she touches herself all the time without being able to distinguish between what is touching and what is touched. This also reveals the importance of nearness for feminine sexuality as well as a moving and being moved endlessly. 

Irigaray has further reflected on what is needed for women to experience their subjectivity with a sexuate specificity. She insists on the women’s need to reach and hold the status of subjects feeling and speaking from their own body and being. This can support their own becoming as fulfilling the wholeness of what they are capable of being. In “Divine Women” (Sexes and Genealogies, translated by Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 55-72, 1993) Irigaray maintains that, in order to become, it is essential to have a divine transcendence as horizon. This means that women require a god who represents the perfection of their subjectivity. The objectification of women, their compliance with masculine models, their duty to be beautiful objects for men, which does not allow them to keep their own physical, bodily beauty, is symptomatic, in Irigaray’s view, of the fact that women lack a feminine god, a divine transcendence which maintains open the perspective in which their flesh can be transfigured. In order to realize such bodily transfiguration through opening up to the divine, Irigaray has not turned toward Western, but toward Eastern, traditions. By practicing yoga and reading texts of the yoga tradition as well as tantric texts, she has learned how to develop what she already intuited: that the body itself can be a divine place and deserves to be treated as such (Between East and West, translated by Stephen Pluhá¢ek. New York: Columbia University Press, 61-62, 2002). My paper follows this turn toward the East; it deals with tantra as it has been appropriated in the West since the late 19^th century. In particular, it relates an ethnographic study concerning tantric women’s workshops, in Belgium and the Netherlands, that approached sexuality in a positive, self-enhancing way respectful of the female body and feminine desire. It explores, referring to the previously mentioned writings of Irigaray, how these workshops helped women to counter (self)-objectification and develop their eroticism and sexuate subjectivity in the horizon of the feminine recognized as potentially divine. In this regard, my paper focuses on key practices in the workshop, notably a ritualized massage of the sex that intended to venerate it as divine; a dialogue between the “me” and the “yoni” (Sanskrit for female sex) which attempted to give voice to the latter; and a fluid and progressively unfolding dance meditation that aimed at heightening women’s erotic sensitivity and vitality beyond actual touch or sexual stimulation. 

The paper further explores modalities that supported this transformative process, highlighting breath and touch as crucial means of awakening the body’s aliveness and developing self-affection. In “The Age of the Breath” (Key Writings. London: Continuum Books, pp. 165-170, 2004), Irigaray maintains that, in order to cultivate the divine in herself, the woman has to attend to her own breathing. This is what can grant her the autonomy and interiority which are needed to enter into relation with another being. Irigaray has not only devoted much of her work to underlining this primacy of breath. She has also insisted time and again not to forget the crucial importance of touch. Her latest book “The Mediation of Touch” (The Mediation of Touch. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2024) is entirely devoted to this topic. In this work, she details how touch can unify, produce and share energy, which leads to an experience of manifestation of life at the psychic and spiritual levels. She also shows how touch, by making possible the passage from the outside to the inside and from the inside to the outside of the body, enables self-affection as a means of concentrating our sensitive potential and of giving shape to our self as a singular physical existence. In Irigaray’s view, this existence is always sexuate. The recognition of one’s specificity and hence partiality as sexuate being is preliminary to bear a relationship with an other who is sexuately different. In a final part, in reference to Irigaray’s writings, my paper examines if and how the workshops contributed to an awareness of the specificity of one’s own sexuate subjectivity. It also considers whether participants experienced a relational opening toward the sexuate different other for which such awareness is needed.