Embodied encounters

exploring Irigaray’s philosophy in art and activism

Abstract

In her collection of essays, This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray insists that a woman’s body is institutionally and infrastructurally confined within an ‘imaginary … too narrowly focused on sameness’ (1985:28). Irigaray’s imperative to highlight the plurality of female (and beyond) sexuality offers a strategic emancipatory departure point for interrogating and liberating other normative hegemonies (such as equality or nature); it is an invitation to challenge our global meta-crisis. I argue that the concept of ‘sustainability,’ not unlike Irigaray’s depiction of woman within the trappings of a masculine imaginary, ironically reflects a toxic repetition of modernity’s economy of commodification and extraction. By framing Irigaray’s appeal to a non-linear impossibility within a bio-synergistic/eco-justice agenda that confronts humanitarian and environmental injustices, I argue that we can evolve our spiritual intelligence to resist replacing one hegemony with another. Through appropriation, exaggeration, and unexpected juxtapositions, and the collaborative intervention involved in constructing and viewing my photographs, my work becomes a strategy to instigate insurgent intersubjectivities – intersubjectivities that refuse the assimilations, reductions, and extractions which characterize modern industrial homogenization. This performance-based essay offers an embodied exposition of my photographs and research, focusing on the mother-daughter relationship in Irigaray’s writings and how these ideas intersect with religious concepts – particularly around the relationship between breath, body, and language in the context of the Sephardic Judaism of my matrilineal genealogy. Through this meditation on my artwork, all of which explores eco-theological intersections of ethics and aesthetics, I attempt to advance an embodied spiritual intelligence as a praxis of collective emancipation from the hegemony of homogenization.