Ep. 375: Luce Irigaray's Feminism (Part Two)

It's the partially examined life episode three seventy five, part two. We've been discussing loose rigorae with guest Jenny Hansen here. We were in the middle of this, the sex, which is not one book from 1977. There is an essay in there called woman on the market that is very tightly related to the, Karl Marx on commodity fetishism that we talked about earlier this year. Folks might wanna even pause and go listen to that if you don't know anything about that. But we'll try to lay out the relevant portions. Seth, did you wanna get us going on this? Sure. I'm gonna start with a quote because I think it's a strong opening. So this is on page two eleven to two twelve. It is because women's bodies, through their use, consumption, and circulation, provide for the condition making social life and culture possible, although they remain an unknown, quote, unquote, infrastructure of the elaboration of that social life and culture, The exploitation of the matter that has been sexualized female is so integral a part of our sociocultural horizon that there is no way to interpret it except within this horizon. And when I read that at first, I was, you know, I wanna say, okay. Well, what do you mean when you say women are commodities? What does that mean? And she elaborates a little further, but essentially, she's referring to the fact, just the bald fact, that if if you think about, let's call it a a family unit or even a tribal unit or something like that, if women don't leave their families and go and marry I'm not even saying marry or do not reproduce with men from other families, then the human race essentially can't perpetuate itself. And so the whole the family structure is kind of the nucleus of the system of production, which involves the exchange of women from one family to another. And I was like, wow. And then, you know, she refers to the incest taboo and I know there's a lot of psychoanalytic work on that. I don't wanna get too far into it because that will draw your attention to like, well, they have to, you know, like how would the human species couldn't? Yes. She knows. She's gonna come back to that point about how we've kind of biologized the whole concept to in a way that it sort of defines female sexuality. But her point is, you know, we don't even think about this. It's so it underlies it's just a basic fact of the way that the species exists or perpetuates itself or functions that we don't even think about the fact that there is a way in which women are commoditized. And if you then say, okay, well, let's take a look more deeply at what that means and what does that do for our attitudes about women versus men and about And she brings in and she sort of elaborates …