Luce Irigaray's Aesthetic

In this paper I examine some key texts in philosopher Luce Irigaray’s oeuvre that I name her aesthetic of sexual difference. Her aesthetic emerges both from critical engagements with women artists and theories of subjectivity formation and cultural formation. I argue that for Irigaray, art- making has an essential role in the thinking and practice of sexual difference. I also argue that because Irigaray reconfigures the terms on which aesthetics traditionally relies, her aesthetic is methodologically indicative, rather than substantively prescriptive of how sexual difference and sexuate culture might be represented.