TY - JOUR

T1 - Collectivity and Feminist History: Situating Luce Irigaray

AU - Roswall, Amanda Grimsbo

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - Luce Irigaray’s essay “When Our Lips Speak Together” has had a major influence on feminist and queer theorists in Europe and the US since it was first published, in French, in the Belgian feminist journal Les Cahiers du GRIF in 1976. Yet the reception of the essay in English has developed largely without taking this first place of publication into account. This has led to a dominant understanding of the essay as representing an intellectualist and essentialist feminism. By unfolding the story of the essay’s compositional history and resituating it in the environment of activist and editing groups in Brussels in the 1970s, this article argues that the essay’s representation of collectivity, enacted with different variations of a recurring “we,” should be reread. The article then turns to the example of Judith Butler’s reading of Irigaray to suggest what the stakes of revisiting the essay in its original context might be. As a whole, the article points to a continuity from the early Irigaray to Butler’s later work, suggesting that texts central to second-wave feminism can allow us to draw knowledge and experience of collective work and organization.

AB - Luce Irigaray’s essay “When Our Lips Speak Together” has had a major influence on feminist and queer theorists in Europe and the US since it was first published, in French, in the Belgian feminist journal Les Cahiers du GRIF in 1976. Yet the reception of the essay in English has developed largely without taking this first place of publication into account. This has led to a dominant understanding of the essay as representing an intellectualist and essentialist feminism. By unfolding the story of the essay’s compositional history and resituating it in the environment of activist and editing groups in Brussels in the 1970s, this article argues that the essay’s representation of collectivity, enacted with different variations of a recurring “we,” should be reread. The article then turns to the example of Judith Butler’s reading of Irigaray to suggest what the stakes of revisiting the essay in its original context might be. As a whole, the article points to a continuity from the early Irigaray to Butler’s later work, suggesting that texts central to second-wave feminism can allow us to draw knowledge and experience of collective work and organization.

M3 - Journal article

VL - 49

SP - 1

EP - 25

JO - Signs

JF - Signs

SN - 0097-9740

IS - 4

ER -