REL 225: Th e Ph ilo so ph y o f Relig io n

Irigaryan Phallocentric musical chairs

This project will attempt to combine one of our favorite in-class activities with one of our seemingly least favorite exercises: speed dating and avoiding phallocentric language! As before, we will pose two debatable issues, this time pertaining to women, and each group will take on the hypothetical arguments for their side (listed below) and pair up with a representative from the opposing group. For 1-2 mins you will sit across from one another and argue for your position and, when the bell rings, switch seats and meet with another opposing group member. However, this time, you will also be charged with attempting to avoid phallocentric terminology; that is, we will try to avoid using nouns, verbs and adjectives in our discussions that explicitly privilege the phallus in your construction(s) of meaning. This will be tricky because the nature of our discussions will be fundamentally phallocentric in the broad sense, hence our focus on avoiding phallocentric terms only. If your discussion partner finds you in violation of using a phallocentric term, they will inform the group and we will determine if you are guilty as charged. If so, you will be removed from the speed dating arena. The speed dating will continue either until time is up, or only one person is left standing, so to speak. As before, at the end of the session we will ask whether you have been convinced by your opponents argument(s) and what position our in-class democracy believes should take priority. Prostitution Several of you raised the issue of (female) prostitution in your response papers, citing it as a concrete case of oppression and subjugation of women; the quintessential example of the male gaze.* But is prostitution always, inherently an act of subjugation or victimization for the prostitute, or could it be an act of empowerment? Rather than allowing society to generate a taboo around prostitution, should we instead legalize it and, therefore, offer many of the protections that come with legalization (mandatory testing, unionization and the like)? Parental Leave In the case of heterosexual unions, should employers grant equal parental leave to a mother and father after the birth of a child, or should extra time be granted to the mother (in the case of a live birth) in order to grant her time for physical recovery, breast feeding (if desired), generating oxytocin through bonding activities (and, thus, lowering the chances for postpartum depression), etc.? The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 made it a federal law that both mothers and fathers can take up to 12 weeks of jobprotected unpaid leave in order to care for a new child. Currently, approximately 163 countries around the globe offer anywhere from 10 weeks to several years (up to 6 for a disabled child) of paid maternity leave for new mothers. Organizations like Dudes and Diapers in the United States are advocating for laws guaranteeing equal paternity leave for men as well.

* I have proposed examining female prostitution (in lieu of male prostitution) acknowledging the issues raised in your response papers and in light of the higher potential physical risk faced by female prostitutes (statistically female prostitutes are more susceptible to disease, they also have the additional risk of pregnancy), thus arguably raising the stakes for this particular group over another.

Luce Irigaray (to keep in mind as you debate) Luce Irigaray* characterizes her project as taking place in three stages: first, deconstructing the masculine subject; second, figuring the possibility for a feminine subject; and third, construing an intersubjectivity that respects sexual difference. In her view, society, by and large, represses maternal genealogy (e.g., we generally take the last names of our fathers) and political life has been predicated on the lineage between fathers and sons and the bonds of brotherhood, appropriating universality and citizenship to men and rendering women as objects of their desire and exchange. This forgetting of the mother leaves women unrepresented in language (as subjects) and incapable of achieving representation in the body politic (as citizens). Thus, Irigaray aims to reinvigorate mother/daughter relations to make possible a feminine subjectivity, and to cultivate sexual difference in the political realm, in civil identity. She rejects the ontological assumptions of both universal equality and separatism, taking both to be implicitly masculine and patriarchal, bound to a metaphysical essentialism that aims to capture diversity in first or final principles, or to subsume particulars under general concepts. Human nature, in her view, is not disembodied or neutral; it is always distinctively sexed. If human nature is two, and always divided, Irigaray argues, then civil identity is also two and divided; the two of nature needs to be brought into the two of culture. The one is an illusion of patriarchy, while the two threatens the phallocentric order and challenges the supposition that universality must be singular. Irigaray does not think she can say what a woman is or what femininity is. Familial, social, and symbolic mechanisms of exchange have denied femininity its own images and language, fashioning women through men's language, images, and desires, and thereby producing an apparent, but false, symmetry within a single, monotonous, language. Against this homogeny, with its same and its other, Irigaray construes the production or work of sexual difference, sexual difference as a relation between-two, to be the path toward liberating both femininity and masculinity from their metaphysical and political constraints by allowing them each to cultivate their own interdependent natures. The idea of a between-two does not mean a singular path that is shared by both, but rather indicates, in addition to the value of a specifically feminine sexual identity and a specifically masculine sexual identity, the ethical path of an intersubjective relationality that allows them to appreciate and value one another. Since the between-two is premised on being-two (self-differentiated), it is in the cultivation of this sexual difference that we will find the possibility of an ethical sexual relation, what Irigaray calls an ethics of sexual difference.

At the conclusion of this exercise, we will explore the implications of Irigaray (and our Miles reading) in terms of religion.

* Adapted from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Psychoanalytic Feminism