Luce Irigaray: “Women on the Market”

Born in 1930, Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French scholar whose works have bridged the gap between psychoanalysis and feminist theory. Active in feminist movements in France and Italy and a pivotal figure in the rise of gender studies in the 1980s, Irigaray is a prolific writer. In 1974, she published her first work, Speculum of the Other Woman, which deconstructed texts in the Western philosophical canon using the theoretical lens of phallocentrism. As understood by feminist scholars, phallocentrism is the perspective that asserts that the masculine, as expressed through the phallus, or male sexual organ, has become central to the Western understanding of meaning, language, economy, and social relations. Phallocentrism has been widely used in literary criticism, psychoanalysis, psychology, linguistics, medicine, and philosophy. Irigaray used the concept in her early works to deconstruct texts by philosophers and by her predecessors in the psychoanalytic tradition, showing that, for earlier psychoanalysts, the phallus served as both a supreme symbol of masculine power and of female weakness.