University of Guelph

Graduate Student, Philosophy Department

PhD Candidate

Thesis Title: Man's Task in Luce Irigaray's Ethics of Sexual Difference

About

I argue that men ought to develop more generous and loving relationships with themselves, with other men, and with women.  I begin from Irigaray’s conception of women’s oppression as a lack of subjectivity or ‘subject position’.  According to Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference, both masculine and feminine subjects would live out relationships of creativity, generosity, and love.  Through these relationships we might accomplish human freedom and happiness, but women’s lack of subjectivity blocks this possibility.  Through a notion of social change inspired by psychoanalytic theory, Irigaray explains the need for the creation of a ‘feminine subjectivity’. 

Expanding upon Irigaray’s call for a ‘feminine subjectivity’, I articulate the transformations necessary for cultivate a new kind of masculine subjectivity.  I show how pornography use reinforces an objectifying mode of sexuality in men and keeps men from relating with women as subjects.  Hence, I argue that pornography use in particular reinforces this mode of sexuality.  Not only does pornography harm women through an exploitative industry of and contributing to a culture of objectification, but it also harms men because it hinders their ability to enter into relationships with women in which both parties are treated fully as subjects.  This, in turn, harms humanity as a whole, because human freedom and happiness depend upon loving relationships between subjects.