Gendered Economies in Luce Irigaray’s ‘When the Goods Get Together’
Luce Irigaray is a French feminist whose work investigates the intersections of language, gender, and identity. Irigaray is critical of well-known and often-revered thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Her works question the ‘phallocentric’ assertions — the phallus as a symbol of male dominance and power — made by these theorists.
In the essay ‘When the Goods Get Together’ — published in the larger work This Sex Which Is Not One (1977) — Irigaray explains the dominant patriarchal socio-cultural economy, challenges psychoanalysis, and proposes a utopia — an “economy of abundance” — all in one not-so-neat package.
There is a lot to unpack in this short essay that continues to be relevant to our understanding of the progression of feminist thought.
‘Male Economy’/Patriarchal Trade — The Market
Irigaray begins the essay by stating,
“The trade that organizes patriarchal societies takes place exclusively among men. Women, signs, goods, currency, all pass from one man to another…”
According to Irigaray, these transactions, being among men only, reveal the law that regulates the socio-cultural order of the ‘male economy’ — that of homosexuality.
Irigaray writes that the “very possibility of the socio-cultural order would necessitate homosexuality.”
But homosexuality not in terms of sexual relations (that’s prohibited — more on that below) but only in the realm of language — or the symbolic order as presented by Lacan.
Note: Irigaray uses a French word for homosexuality/hom(m)-o-sexuality that could translate as ‘sameness’ or ‘oneness’ — the single/one way in which exchange occurs among men in patriarchal trade. Some also understand Irigaray’s use of this term as ‘homosociality’.
To briefly explain Lacan — the symbolic order is the realm of (phallocentric) language. The mirror stage — where a child identifies his image in the mirror as the self — marks the initiation into the symbolic order (from the imaginary order).
Most significantly, in the symbolic order, the ‘name of the father’ breaks the dyad of the mother and child. As Sean Homer explains in Jacques Lacan (Routledge Critical Thinkers series),
“The function of the paternal metaphor is to substitute the desire for the mother with the law of the father.”
Note: Jacques Lacan (Routledge Critical Thinkers series) by Sean Homer is an accessible introduction to the French psychoanalyst’s work.
Irigaray refers to father-son relations as a means of assuring “the genealogy of patriarchal power, its laws, its discourse, [and] its sociality.”
This is the market — the dominant socio-cultural economy — as presented by Irigaray. And there are rules of the Market.
Prohibition and Pretence — The Rules of the Market
Irigaray writes,
“Trade relations, always among men, would thus be both required and forbidden by the [Patriarchal] law” (original emphasis).
The first rule, then, is that of ‘forbidding’ — of prohibition.
There are two main prohibitions in Irigaray’s assessment: incest and homosexual relations in terms of sex, desire, and pleasure.
With regards to incest, the reference is to the incest taboo — whose ‘universality’ in human societies was argued by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structure of Kinship (1955). According to Lévi-Strauss, cultures promote the exchange of women in marriage and exogamy — prevent endogamy (or ‘incestuous’ ties) — to strengthen social solidarity among men and create alliances (the ‘alliance theory’).
In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud also argued that the prohibition against incest provides the foundation for all subsequent social laws. For Lacan, the transition from nature to culture happens via the internalisation of the incest taboo.
The second prohibition is homosexual relations in terms of sex, desire, and pleasure. Irigaray explains,
“When the penis itself becomes simply a means of pleasure… the phallus [the standard of value] loses its power” (original emphasis).
And
“These masculine subjects would be traders only at the price of renouncing their function as goods.”
To put it simply, for patriarchal trade to be what it is, the incest taboo must be held in place and sexual relations among men should be prohibited.
This brings us to the second rule of this market — pretence.
Homosexuality — in terms of the law of exchange that organises the ‘male economy’ — must be kept in the realm of pretence, under the garb of compulsory heterosexuality — the exchange of goods, including women, among men.
The ‘Goods’ in the Market
Irigaray then asks a significant question,
“…how can one account for the relations between women in this system of trade?” (original emphasis).
According to Irigaray, female homosexuality escaped Freud. She is critical of Freud’s reduction of relations among women to “acting like a man” — an assertion that we are not entirely unfamiliar with in the stereotypes that exist even today.
Freud, writes Irigaray, when faced with a female patient’s desire towards another woman assessed it as the adoption of a masculine behaviour vis-a-vis the object of her love and even observed masculine aspects in her physical features.
Therefore, Irigaray writes,
“The dominant sociocultural economy permits female homosexuals only the choice between a sort of animality… or the mine of masculine models” (original emphasis).
And
“Female homosexuality exists, nevertheless. But it is admitted only in as far as it is prostituted to the fantasies of men. Goods can only enter into relations under the surveillance of their guardians… And their relations must be relations of rivalry in the interest of the tradesmen.”
Again, these are ideas that we are not entirely unfamiliar with today.
‘Female Economy’/An Economy of Abundance
What if the ‘goods’ refused to go to the market? What if they created a new trade among themselves? — These are Irigaray’s final concerns in the essay.
Irigaray characterises this new society, this ‘female economy’ — that will be “protected from masculine transactions” — as,
“Exchange without identifiable terms of trade, without accounts, without end… Without a standard of value.”
And
“Where use and exchange would mingle… there would be free enjoyment, well-being without suffering, pleasure (jouissance) without possession.”
Her idea of multiplicity and trade in this ‘female economy’ around multiple axes (“without one plus one, without series, without number”) challenges the ‘oneness’ or one-way exchange that characterises the ‘male economy’.
Note: As discussed, hom(m)-o-sexuality could translate as ‘sameness’ or ‘oneness’ — the single/one-way exchange among men. As against this, ‘female’ is the ‘sex which is not one’ (the title of Irigaray’s work).
This self-acknowledged ‘utopia’ presented by Irigaray is an “economy of abundance” — which has always challenged patriarchal trade but hasn’t been recognised “because of the necessity of restricting incest to the realm of pure pretence.”
Women’s Writing — When the ‘Goods’ Get Together
Irigaray’s proposal of the ‘goods’ getting together has also been seen as corresponding to the idea of “women’s writing” or “écriture féminine” — a concept given by the French theorist Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’.
Cixous describes this style of writing as one that seeks to recapture the pleasures of the imaginary order — as women’s imaginary “is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible” — while undermining the symbolic order.
Male writing, according to Cixous, is run by “a libidinal and cultural — hence political, typically masculine — economy” and this is “a locus where the repression of women has been perpetuated, over and over… where woman has never [had] her turn to speak…” (original emphasis). It has been characterised by “the same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism.”
Cixous proposes that woman “must write her self” to reclaim her body and representations of her body and seize the occasion to speak. She writes,
“It is by writing… and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence” (emphasis added).
Feminist, Female, Feminine — Criticism Against Irigaray
These ideas of “women’s writing” and “an economy [or society] of abundance” come dangerously close to — what Toril Moi in the essay ‘Feminist, Female, Feminine’ (1989) calls — biological essentialism.
Moi makes a distinction between ‘female’ — biological sex — and ‘feminine’ — a cultural construct or “patterns of sexuality and behaviour imposed by cultural and social norms.” According to Moi, patriarchy wants us to believe that there is such a thing as “an essence of femaleness, called femininity”. Biologism is “the belief that such an essence is biologically given.” This ‘essentialism’ — this belief in a given female nature — “plays into the hands of those who want women to conform to predefined patterns of femininity”.
Irigaray and Cixous, Moi argues, fall into the trap of this biological essentialism. Cixous, writes Moi, “finds herself in great trouble when she tries to distinguish her concept of a feminine writing from the idea of a female writing” (original emphasis). Moi expands,
“It is after all patriarchy, not feminism, which has always believed in a true female/feminine nature: the biologism and essentialism which lurk behind the desire to bestow feminine virtues on all female bodies necessarily plays into the hands of the patriarchs.”
Defining feminism as “a specific kind of political discourse: a critical and theoretical practice committed to the struggle against patriarchy and sexism”, Moi writes that “the very act of being [biologically] female does not necessarily guarantee a feminist approach.”
Regardless of Moi’s criticism, it is important to place Irigaray and Cixous within the historical frameworks and theoretical traditions that they were writing in — and the ones that they were writing against, specifically male-dominated psychoanalysis. Even if we were to see their arguments as tinged with biological essentialism, we cannot undermine their contributions to the progression of feminist thought.
