Luce Irigaray's Phenomenology of Feminine Being

The reception of Luce Irigaray s ideas about feminine identity has centered largely on questions of essentialism, whether criticizing this as a destructive flaw or interpreting it in strategic or pragmatic terms. Staking out an alternative approach, Virpi Lehtinen finds in the phenomenology of Husse [...]
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The reception of Luce Irigaray s ideas about feminine identity has centered largely on questions of essentialism, whether criticizing this as a destructive flaw or interpreting it in strategic or pragmatic terms. Staking out an alternative approach, Virpi Lehtinen finds in the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty a framework for what she characterizes as dynamic essentialism, which seeks to account for the complex networks of lived experience: embodied, affective, and spiritual relations to oneself, to others, and to the world. Rather than prescribing one norm to which all women should conform, Lehtinen argues, Irigaray s work exemplifies how each individual woman in her own way contributes to a norm of femininity that is both unique and singular but also connected to the existential styles of past, present, and future others."