Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Luce Irigaray


Luce Irigaray was born in the 1930s in Belgium. In 1955 she received a Master’s Degree from the University of Louvain. She taught high school in Brussells from 1956-1959. She went back to school to get a Master’s Degree from the University of Paris in psychology. She then worked for the Fondation Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Belgium; where she began as a research assistant at the Centre in Paris.
In the 1960s Irigaray participated in Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic seminars. In 1968 she received a Doctorate in Linguistics and then taught for a while at the Univeristy of Vincennes. It was in 1969 she analyzed Antionette Fouque, a feminist leader and she was intrigued. Her second Doctorate thesis, “Speculum of the Other Woman,” was shortly followed by the ending of her employment at the University of Vincennes. The phallocentric economy she condemned in her thesis would be the very one that would try to silence her.
Irigaray then moved to the feminist circles where she found an audience, though she refused to be apart of any one group. She soon became active though, participating in demonstrations and was even invited to speak at seminars and conference throughout Europe. The continuation of this led to the publishing of An Ethics of Sexual Difference, which established Irigaray as a major Continental philosopher.
Since then her works have continued to influence the feminist movement in France and Italy. She has continued to conduct research on the difference between the language of women and the language of men; that involves men and women who speak various languages.
Irigaray continues to philosophize and research and publish her thoughts. She has written 19 books in three different languages and has published numerous articles. She also continues to be heard, speaking, for as a linguist Irigaray sees the value in the spoken word, in dialogue or better put Conversations.

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