SOURCE: Holmlund, Christine. “The Lesbian, the Mother, the Heterosexual Lover: Irigaray's Recodings of Difference.” Feminist Studies 17, no. 2 (summer 1991): 283-308.

In the following essay, Holmlund surveys Irigaray's oeuvre and its critical reception, identifying three central tropes that inform her criticism and the political/literary implications of these devices in the evolution of her thought.

To North American feminists encountering Luce Irigaray for the first time, several of the themes underlying her wide-ranging theoretical and empirical investigations will seem familiar: (1) her overt, uncompromising challenge to male systems of thought; (2) her continual recognition that theoretical choices carry with them practical implications; and (3) her ongoing insistence that language usage both constitutes and perpetuates sexual inequality. Other stances may well seem alien: (1) her immersion in European philosophical debates; (2) her strategic invocations of essentialism; and (3) her apparent failure to examine concrete aspects of women's lives.

Unlike most North American feminists, Irigaray rereads and rewrites...