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patriarchy’s definition of sexual difference, which foregrounds men’s superiority). Obviously, this is hardly a real choice. Patriarchal power is also evident, for Irigaray, in what many thinkers refer to as the male gaze: the man looks; the woman is looked at. And it is the one who looks who is in control, who holds the power to name things, the power to explain the world and so to rule the world. The one looked at—the woman—is merely an object to be seen. Thus, in a patriarchy, women are merely tokens, markers, commodities in a male economy. In other words, women function to display men’s relations to other men. To cite the simplest example, a patriar‑ chal man who feels he must have a beautiful woman on his arm in order to impress other people isn’t interested in impressing other people. He’s interested in impressing other men. In short, patriarchy is a man’s world: men invent the rules of the game, they play it only with one another, and women are merely to be found among the prizes. Like Cixous, Irigaray argues that the way to get beyond patriarchy is by means of the same vehicle that programmed us within patriarchy: language. And she believes that women-only groups are necessary for the development of nonpa‑ triarchal ways of thinking and speaking. Irigaray calls her notion of woman’s language womanspeak, and she finds its source in the female body, specifically in what she sees as the contrast between female and male sexual pleasure. For her, female sexual pleasure is “far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined” (28). And so is wom‑ anspeak more diversified, more multiple in its meanings, more complex, and more subtle than patriarchal language. As Irigaray puts it, when a woman dares speak in her own way, “ ‘she’ sets off in all directions leaving ‘him’ [the patriar‑ chal man] unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradic‑ tory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand” (29). For some feminist thinkers, Irigaray’s definition of womanspeak is particu‑ larly controversial because, among other things, it seems to reinforce patriarchal stereotypes of women as illogical or even irrational. One productive way to view womanspeak, however, might be to consider what seems to me, at least, to be the very strong possibility that Irigaray is not saying that women speak incoher‑ ently but that this is how it seems to patriarchal people, programmed to attribute meaning only to language that conforms to patriarchal rules of logic, that is, to linear, thesis-oriented language. In contrast, Julia Kristeva, another French psychoanalytic feminist, doesn’t believe in écriture féminine or womanspeak because she believes that any theory that essentializes women (that is, that posits essential—inborn, biological— characteristics for women) misrepresents their infinite diversity and leaves them
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