In my essay, I consider the work of Luce Irigaray and ask: how can Irigaray’s work help us to challenge an oversimplified version of a biological determinism assuming that sexual difference is solely based on a biological dimorphism? How can we read Irigaray against this cisgenderism and explore other gendered possibilities? And why should we think of gender as different? 

Firstly, Irigaray’s conception of sexual difference is not only a biological one, but an ontological one. For Irigaray, the fact that our society makes a distinction between men and women and bestows legal rights differently does not correspond to the recognition of sexual difference, but to the fact that our society erases sexual difference. Western metaphysics posits the human subject as neutral, even if this subject is in reality masculine, as the only possible subject, and therefore nullifies the possibility of a feminine subject, rendering it unimaginable. The dominant masculine subject tries to appropriate everything and posits an other, the feminine, as his other, which does not mean the recognition of a real otherness. Therefore, in our current culture, “as theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the masculine” (Irigaray, Speculum, p.133),  the feminine subject can only conform to the masculine subject in order to be considered as a subject. Indeed, the masculine subject aims at acknowledging only himself and the remakes of himself.

Understood as an ontological difference – one that has to do with what kind of subjectivity is assumed to be the neutral subject and what does it means to be subject – sexual difference is thus not merely biological. Besides, Irigaray for years uses the words “sexuate” (sexué) and “sexuation”, notably to indicate her difference from the understanding of sex as only biological and gender as only social. Sexuation challenges the dominant societal assumption that only men are universal subjects, while also challenging the liberal feminist viewpoint that women should strive to become legal subjects just like men. Sexuation reminds us that no human is in the neuter and all humans are sexuate. This does not mean that we are all, or only, sexuate according to the current gender binary. 

The second way in which Irigaray’s notion of sexuation differs from a mere biological determinism is her emphasis on touch. Irigaray explains that the current male-dominant understanding of sexuality is unable to approach women’s sexuality. Women’s desire has been “submerged” in “the logic that has dominated the West,” which is determined by “the predominance of the visual, and (of) the discrimination and individualization of the form” (This Sex which Is not One, 25). Irigaray also points out the fact that Western metaphysics has prioritized the “One” as representing more truth than the relational two and multiple, has also favored visibility as the quintessential model of knowledge. These priorities – and their degraded counterpart – shape our mode of understanding human sexuality. In accordance with such logic, only the visible is valid and the female sex amounts to “the horror of nothing to see” (26). 

Irigaray thinks that women’s sexuality is not definable by the “one” or the ‘One’- it is defined neither by one organ nor by an organ that is one, and it is not confined to only one moment of sexual intercourse. The vulva represents both the lack of a one – a nothingness and an opposite with regard to the one – and a plural, beginning with two, a “ contact of at least two (lips)” (26). When seen as merely the counterpart of male sexuality, the vagina is perceived as nothing, because it is “[t]he negative, the underside, the reverse of the only visible and morphologically designable organ… the penis” (27). However, when seen as erotic and sensitive zones, women’s sexuality appears polymorphous and permeable –  for example, the labia have a plural sexual sensitivity. The duality and inseparability of the labia, the co-existence of clitoral and vaginal sensuousness, and the various erotic zones and their complex sensations make women’s sexuality not one, but “plural” (28). 

According to me, Irigaray’s “The Sex Which Is Not One” concerns not physiology or anatomy, but it uncovers the sensitive and sensuous zones of the body. Irigaray offers a rediscovery of our ignored and unspeakable sensations. This does not mean replacing “the organic” with “the subjective” (This Sex which Is not One, 60), but living the organic not through vision but through the sensation provided with the mucous self-touch. Could we imagine the labia not as an organ that we can point to and designate by a name, but as the place of the diffuse, invisible, unstoppable feeling of a self-touch? If the cisgenderist understanding of the body believes in what can be seen, notably as genitals, more than in what can be felt, then a rediscovery of the invisible sensations and the ways we can touch ourselves, in particular as women, can and should disrupt the usual manner of dealing with our bodies. 

Thirdly, I turn to the ethics of difference. Irigaray critiques the Western philosophy as hommo-sexual, meaning that it is produced by man as “the phallogocentric, self-replicating” and “other-destroying Western subject” (Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave?, 36). In this economy, “women’s heterosexual desire for penetrative destruction—is not woman’s desire at all but rather the phantasmic projection of woman as the Other of the Same, and a desire that functions only as the complement of a masculine, phallic, macho model” (Huffer, “Are the Lips a Grave,” 524-525). The presumed women’s desire for men is then a projection by men of what they need – how they require to be desired in their effort of self-making and remaining the traditional  Western subject. 

In response to that, Irigaray reminds us of the fact that neither woman nor man can speak in the name of the human subject. In The Mediation of Touch (2024), she stresses that our fundamental sexuate difference prevents either man or woman from being a universal human subject—a neutered subject who could speak for all humans and have all experiences – that no human being is universal, that from our being born as a man or a woman, we are limited. Sexuation is not “a partial aspect of our organism” but “a founding and structuring dimension of our being” (The Mediation of Touch, 52). Sexuate difference is a difference that we cannot master and reduce by dialectics or through an ideal unification, and it needs a new kind of ethics that recognizes such difference. My effort to read Irigaray against cisgenderism, leads me to suggest that we do not transform an experience regarding trans into cis terms and that we hold all bodies in their difference. One question remains: how could one be sexuated in a way that is different?