SOURCE: Robbins, Ruth. “‘Mirror, Mirror … ’: Luce Irigaray and Reflections of and on the Feminine.” In Transitions: Literary Feminisms, pp. 146-67. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Robbins discusses how Luce Irigaray constructs her concept of feminine identity in such works as Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One, noting how Irigaray's notion of feminism questions the psychological precepts of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.

Luce Irigaray was born in 1930 in Belgium, though she is now a French national. As Margaret Whitford has noted, however, she strongly resists the tendency of criticism to focus on biography, fearing the kinds of ad feminam critiques that operate by ‘neutralizing a woman thinker whose work is radically challenging [by reducing her] to her biography’ (Whitford 1991, 1-2). Her work is in the fields of philosophy, linguistics and psychoanalysis, and she is also a...