The Nature of Sexual Difference

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of sexual difference as a pre-eminent question not only of cultural and social but also of biological relations. If sexual difference is a biological force then it must pervade the world of animals as much as the cultural world of humans. Charles Darwin’s work may provide a framework from which to understand Luce Irigaray’s central conception of sexual difference. This paper explores the possible relations between them.

Keywords:

• Irigaray
• Darwin
• sexual selection
• nature/culture

Notes

A shorter, different version of this paper has been published as “Sexual Difference as Sexual Selection: Irigarayan Reflections on Darwin” in Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011) 143–68.

1. Luce Irigaray, “Sexual Difference” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Gillian C. Gill and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993) 5.

2. Irigaray has always been suspicious of the attempts, primarily in the work of Derrida and Deleuze (and Guattari), to elaborate a politics of “becoming woman” in which sexual difference, while being abstractly recognized, is nonetheless continually undermined by men's attempts to “become woman” without recognizing that such a becoming woman is a fantasy while it functions through the everyday operations of a male morphology. She urges men to cease becoming women and to begin becoming a new kind of man:

As far as I am concerned, “becoming woman” or “becoming a woman” corresponds to cultivating my own identity, the identity which is mine by birth. For Deleuze, it amounts to becoming what he is not by birth. If I appeal to a return to nature, to the body – that is, to values that our Western culture has scorned – Deleuze acts in the opposite way: according to him it would be possible and suitable to become someone or something which is without relation to my original and material belonging. How could this be possible above all from the part of a man with respect to becoming woman? Putting on the stereotypes concerning femininity? Deleuze would want to become the woman who Simone de Beauvoir did not want to become? (Luce Irigaray, “Becoming Woman” in Conversations, trans. and eds. Stephen Pluháček et al. (London: Continuum, 2008) 79)

3. See Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray. Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1990); Carolyne Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford, eds., Engaging with Irigaray (New York: Columbia UP, 1994); Ellen Mortensen, Touching Thought: Ontology and Sexual Difference (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004).

4. “Whether through collective psychosis or cynicism, sexual difference, which constitutes the most basic human reality, is treated like an almost non-existent problem” (Luce Irigaray, “Preface” in Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, trans. Karen Montin (London: Routledge, 1994) ix).

5. This is the claim that Irigaray elaborates in “Thinking Life as a Relation” in Conversations 5.

6. For more detail, see Luce Irigaray, “Towards a Sharing of Speech” in Key Writings (London: Continuum, 2004) 77.

7. Irigaray makes this claim in “The Time of Difference” in Why Different? A Culture of Two Subjects. Interviews with Luce Irigaray, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e)) 96.

8. 

Sexuate difference is the most basic and the most universal difference. It is also the difference which operates, or ought to operate, each time, in the connection between nature and culture for everyone. This connection is specific to girl and woman in comparison with boy and man. (Irigaray, “Becoming Woman” in Conversations 77)

9. As Irigaray argues in “The Redemption of Women” in Key Writings 157.

10. Irigaray claims that sexual difference, while it does not cause or explain all other social differences, provides a necessary mode of engagement which has profound implications for how all social minorities are understood and treated. See “Thinking Life as a Relation” in Conversations 18.

11. Ibid. 5.

12. Luce Irigaray, “Human Nature is Two” in I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996) 35.

13. Ibid. 37.

14. Ibid. 39.

15. Luce Irigaray, “The Culture of Difference” in Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1993) 46.

16. Luce Irigaray, “Different but United through a New Alliance” in Why Different? 118–19.

17. Luce Irigaray, “A Chance to Live” in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. G.C. Gill (New York: Columbia UP, 1993) 16. Subsequent page numbers are given in the text.

18. Luce Irigaray, “Donning a Civil Identity” in I Love to You 50–51.

19. Luce Irigaray, “The Universal as Mediation” in Sexes and Genealogies 137.

20. Irigaray, “Sexual Difference as Universal” in I Love to You 47.

21. This is, in part, the object of investigation of Timothy Lenoir's book The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century Biology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989).

22. Irigaray, “Donning a Civil Identity” in I Love to You 50.

23. See Patricia Gowaty, ed., Feminism and Evolutionary Biology: Boundaries, Intersections, and Frontiers (New York: Chapman, 1997), especially the chapters by Helena Cronin, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Margo Wilson, Marlene Zuk, Victoria Sork, and Zuleyma Tang-Martinez. See also Griet Vandermassen, Who's Afraid of Charles Darwin? Debating Feminism and Evolutionary Theory (New York: Rowman, 2005).

24. This claim is now most closely associated with Richard Dawkins’ book of the same name – The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 2006) – but it is a pervasive assumption within evolutionary thought; see the work of Daniel Dennett and E.O. Wilson.

25. As Dawkins claims, the animal can be reduced to its sex cells and its sex-cells can be largely, indeed solely, explained in terms of the size and quantity of gametes:

there is one fundamental feature of the sexes which can be used to label males as males, and females as females, throughout animals and plants. This is that the sex cells or “gametes” of males are much smaller and more numerous than the gametes of females […] it is possible to interpret all the other differences between the sexes as stemming from this one basic difference. (Dawkins, Selfish Gene 141)

26. Dennett makes explicit the kind of algorithmic reduction of evolution to a step-by-step process, a position I have critiqued in The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004) 48ff.

27. Helena Cronin asserts that biology provides or should provide an account of human nature, one that is of relevance in the work of policy- and law-makers who address this given nature in a variety of forms to transform behavior enacted on its basis: “All policy-making should incorporate an understanding of human nature, and that means both female and male nature” (Helena Cronin, “Getting Human Nature Right” in Science at the Edge, ed. John Brockman (London: Weidenfeld, 2004) 61).

28. In, for example, the more postmodern understanding of the problem of essentialism in the writings of Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Feminism and Behavioral Evolution: A Taxonomy” in Feminism and Evolutionary Biology 47.

29. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981) I: 94.

30. It must also be noted that, in spite of well-intended commitment to a broad egalitarianism, his understanding of the relations between men and women is in fact quite ambivalent. He affirms in certain places that women are less intellectual, less detached, more sympathetic and warm than men. At times he affirms women's social qualities as if they were biological qualities while at other times he seems to acknowledge that social pressures exert a considerable force in transforming character traits and personal abilities. See, for example, Darwin, Descent of Man II: 326–27.

31. Ibid. 366–67.

32. Darwin argues that it is the social treatment of women that requires transformation if women are to attain the pre-eminence of some men (ibid. 329).

33. Karl Marx qtd in Howard E. Gruber and Paul H. Barrett, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (New York: Dutton, 1974) 71.

34. This is Darwin's first published reference to sexual selection. Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species by Means of Transmutation, or Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: Modern Library, 1998) 117.

35. Darwin, Descent of Man II: 254.

36. Darwin, Origin of Species 118.

37. See especially Darwin's claims in Descent of Man II: 256–58. Subsequent page numbers are given in the text.

38. 

Thus the more vigorous females, which are the first to breed, will have the choice of many males; and though they may not always select the strongest or best armed, they will select those which are vigorous and well armed, and in other respects the most attractive. (262)

39. Darwin, Descent of Man I: 207–11.

40. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, Evolution by Natural Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1958) 263.

41. Michael T. Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (Berkeley: U of California P, 1969) 219.

42. Charles Darwin, A Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirripedia – With Figures of all the Species (London: FQ, 2010).

43. Ibid. 210–11.

44. Ibid. 207. “In the mammalian class the males possess in their vesiculæ prostraticæ rudiments of a uterus with the adjacent passage; they bear also rudiments of mammæ, and some male marsupials have rudiments of a marsupial sack” (ibid. 208).

45. Ibid.

46. In a letter to his friend Hooker, Darwin explains his discovery of the emergence of maleness in a particular barnacle species:

I have lately got a bisexual cirripede, the male being microscopically small and parasitic within the sack of the female. I tell you of this to boast of my species theory, for the nearest closely allied genus to it is, as usual, hermaphrodite, but I had observed some minute parasites adhering to it, and these parasites I now can show are supplemental males, the male organs in the hermaphrodite being unusually small, though perfect and containing zoosperms: so we have almost a polygamous animal, simple females alone being wanting. I never should have made this out, had not my species theory convinced me, that an hermaphrodite species must pass into a bisexual species by insensibly small stages; and here we have it, for the male organs in the hermaphrodite are beginning to fail, and independent males ready formed. (Darwin qtd in Ghiselin, Triumph of the Darwinian Method 115)

47. Rebecca Stott, Darwin and the Barnacle (New York: Norton, 2003) 85.

48. Darwin qtd in ibid. 100.

49. 

The whole [male] animal is reduced to an envelope […] containing the testes, vesicula, & penis. In male Ibla, we have hardly any cirri or thorax; in some male Scalpellums no mouth […] I believe that males occur on every female; in one case I found 12 males & two pupae on point of metamorphosis permanently attached by cement to one female! (Darwin, letter to Hancock qtd in ibid. 213)

50. As Darwin explains, in a letter to Henslow:

But here comes the odd fact, the male or sometimes two males, at the instant they cease being locomotive larvae become parasitic within the sack of the female, & thus fixed & half embedded in the flesh of their wives they pass their whole lives & can never move again. Is it not strange that nature should have made this one genus unisexual & yet have fixed the males on the outside of the females. (Qtd in ibid. 101)

51. 

He who admits the principle of sexual selection will be led to the remarkable conclusion that the cerebral system not only regulates most of the existing functions of the body, but has indirectly influenced the progressive development of various bodily structures and of certain mental qualities. (Darwin, Descent of Man II: 402)

52. In, for example, Irigaray, “Introducing: Love between Us” in I Love to You 34, 38, where she discusses plants and flowers; and Luce Irigaray, “Animal Compassion” in Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity, eds. Peter Atterton and Mathew Calarco (London: Continuum, 2004) 195–201.