Speculum of the Other Woman Quotes

“-the words "female libido" cannot mean anything, since the possibility that they might mean anything would inevitably lead us to question the project and projections of that meaning itself. The "unjustifiable," intolerable nature of those words "female libido," would be one symptom of something outside that threatened the signs, the sense, the syntax, the systems of representation of a meaning and a praxis designed to the precise specifications of the (masculine) "subject" of the story.”
― Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman

“After which, Freud goes on: "The castration complex of girls is also started the sight of the genitals of the other sex. Etc." Here again the little girl will have to act like the little boy, feel the same urge to see, look in the same way, and her resentment at not having a penis must follow and corroborate the horrified astonishment the little boy feels when faced with the strangeness of the nonidentical, the nonidentifiable. The "reality" of the girl's castration could be summed up as follows: you men can sec nothing, can know nothing of this; can neither discover nor recognize yourselves in this. All that remains, therefore, is for me, for her (or them), to accept this fact. As a biological fact! The girl thus "enters" into the castration complex in the same way as the boy, like a boy. She "comes out" of it feminized by a decision, which she is duty bound to ratify, that there cannot be a nothing to be seen. The idea that a "nothing to be seen," a something not subject to the rule of visibility or of specula(riza)tion, might yet have some reality, would indeed be intolerable to man. It would serve to threaten the theory and practice ofthe representation by which he aims to sublimate, or avoid the ban on, masturbation.”
― Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman