When Equality Justifies Women’s
Subjection: Luce Irigaray’s Critique
of Equality and the Fathers’ Rights
Movement
SERENE J. KHADER
The “fathers’ rights” movement represents policies that undermine women’s reproductive autonomy as furthering the cause of gender equality. Khader argues that
this movement exploits two general weaknesses of equality claims identified by Luce
Irigaray. She shows that Irigaray criticizes equality claims for their appeal to a genderneutral universal subject and for their acceptance of our existing symbolic repertoire.
This article examines how the plaintiffs’ rhetoric in two contemporary “fathers’ rights”
court cases takes advantage of these weaknesses.
Much of the contemporary “fathers’ rights” movement (FRM) is devoted
to promoting the view that policies that undermine women’s reproductive
autonomy actually promote gender equality. I argue here that this strategy takes
advantage of certain general weaknesses of equality claims that Luce Irigaray has
identified. In the first section, I claim that Irigaray criticizes equality without
categorically rejecting it, especially two particular tendencies of equality claims:
the tendency to assume the possibility and appropriateness of a gender-neutral
universal subject and the tendency not to challenge the limits of our extant
symbolic repertoire.
In the second section, I show that the rhetoric of the FRM exploits these
weaknesses of equality claims. I look at two cases—one involving a man’s
attempt to be released from the obligation to pay child support for a child he
does not want and one involving a man seeking a legal injunction to prevent
Hypatia vol. 23, no. 4 (October–December 2008) © by Serene J. Khader
Serene J. Khader
49
his ex-girlfriend from having an abortion. The cases appeal to a gender-neutral
universal that depends on facile analogies between women and men’s experiences of reproduction. They also appeal to existing symbolic configurations that
require that such analogies begin from degraded representations of women’s
bodies and experiences. I conclude by indicating that Irigaray’s proposal of
sexuate rights suggests new ways of thinking about abortion rights that do not
assume the exchangeability of women and men’s experiences of reproduction.
Irigaray’s Critique of Equality
Is Irigaray against Equality?
Depictions of feminism as promoting inequality proliferate in contemporary
culture. Most of us who have taught feminist classes have heard students say
that they are not feminists because they believe women and men are equal. In
the late 1990s, actor Drew Barrymore pronounced, “I’m an equalist. I won’t say
I’m a feminist” (Pride 1998).
This conception of feminism also suffuses our political culture. A major
message of the movement against affirmative action is the claim that it gives
unfair advantages to women and minorities—thus compromising the equality
of white men. It is a common right-wing argument against same-sex marriage
that everyone already has an equal right to get married to a person of the
opposite sex1—and that opposition to same-sex marriage means support for an
equal status quo. The Bush administration commission that weakened Title IX
in 2003 was called “The Commission on Equal Opportunity in Athletics.” A
repeated claim of the male athletes who testified before it was that requirements
for gender parity in athletics unfairly advantaged women.
It may once have been warranted to presume that opposition to feminism
would be articulated in the language of difference rather than equality. The idea
that gender equality is an undesirable or unfeasible goal has not disappeared
from our political or theoretical landscape. Its prevalence helps explain academic feminism’s suspicion of rhetorics of difference—even purportedly feminist
rhetorics of difference. Academic feminism has—rightly, in my view—built
up an arsenal of arguments against pernicious uses of the language of difference.2 But as Penelope Deutscher notes, “arguments for equality, no less than
arguments for difference, can be used selectively and opportunistically” (2002,
9). The ubiquity of antifeminist invocations of equality in our contemporary
political climate charges feminists with the task of developing more thorough
critical analyses of equality.
Luce Irigaray offers useful criticisms of equality. Her criticisms draw on
two insights from her work on the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis.
The first of these is that Western thought operates according to a “logic of the
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same” in which individual entities that are assumed to be exchangeable for one
another must be evaluated based on their likeness to a (masculine) universal.
The second is that the set of available symbols for women’s experiences requires
them to be represented as masculine, devalued, or not at all. I will suggest that
we can think of the first insight as an observation about the symbolic context
in which political equality claims typically function and the second insight as
an analysis of the logical structure of equality claims.
Readers with egalitarian feminist commitments may suppose that an Irigarayan analysis of equality claims has little to offer them because they understand
her critique of equality to be deeply ideological. They may suspect that anything
that Irigaray says about equality will be tied to assumptions that are incompatible with egalitarian feminisms.3 I believe that this suspicion is mistaken,
however, since both Irigaray and egalitarian feminists proclaim that the sexes
are of equal moral value. She sees “equivalent social status” as the rightful aim
of feminist movements and says both sexes need access to a “human identity”
(1993b, 86). For Irigaray, equivalent social status must be understood as equal
access for each sex to the type of moral life appropriate to it. Though Irigaray
may disagree with some egalitarian feminists about what is to be equalized, she
does not claim that the ideal of equality has nothing to recommend it.
Moreover, Irigaray agrees with egalitarian feminists that egalitarian reforms
are necessary for the improvement of women’s social status. She asserts that
such reforms are not only tolerable but also indispensable (1985b, 81). Without
certain types of political equality, women cannot be in a position to demand
recognition as distinct moral beings.4
I read Irigaray’s critique of equality as an enumeration of the dangers facing
egalitarian political strategies rather than a rejection of egalitarian ideals. In
order to read Irigaray in this way, we must distinguish the political strategy of
claiming equality from the moral belief that women and men are equal. It is
possible to disconnect the moral claim from the political strategy, because it is up
for debate whether claiming equality is always the best way to achieve equality.5
Not only can we not predict the effects of political speech acts independently of
their contexts; empirical evidence that claiming equality sometimes promotes
inequality abounds.
Most of Irigaray’s scathing comments about equality assess the failures of
actual political movements. Actual events have created a political context in
which the language of equality is often the language of power, the language
that legitimates the status quo. She remarks that slogans like “France has opted
for equality rather than difference” (2001, 33) and “equality of opportunity”
(142) obscure the fact that women and men in the status quo are radically
unequal. Some reforms made in the name of equality have even reinforced the
subordinate status of women. Among these are the extension of parliamentary
offices to women (83) and the incorporation of women into the paid economy
Serene J. Khader
51
(1993b, 85). For her, the extension of political office to women usually represents the incorporation of women into a corrupted form of democracy. The
inclusion of women into the paid economy implicates them in the degradation
of dependency work and the promotion of harm to the earth (85).6
But if Irigaray’s comments on equality were limited to piecemeal criticisms
of actual policies, her critique of equality would not be philosophical. She
examines the failures of actual movements to teach us something about equality
claims in general. The fact that egalitarian strategies are sometimes insufficient
or dangerous is not merely the result of bad luck, according to her. Rather, the
structure of equality claims is such that they will tend to fail in certain predictable ways—even if the tendency to such failures does not provide sufficient
reason to throw out equality claims altogether.
Irigaray wants us to pay particular attention to one structural feature of
political equality claims. This is that—since they are usually demands that some
existing inequality be redressed—they usually take the actual status of one sex in
the status quo as a desirable universal. What one sex actually has is what both
sexes should have. This manifests what Irigaray disdainfully calls “sociological
thinking”—the idea that the universal we should aim for is something we can
find actualized in the world in which we already live (2003, vii)—irrespective
of the fact that that world is already dehumanized and dehumanizing” (167).
More important, the idea that both sexes should have what one sex has in
the status quo makes equality claims susceptible to employing facile analogies
between the experiences of women and men. In a world where the universal
has already been designed to exclude women and women’s experiences tend
to be represented in a degraded way, we can expect that equality claims will
often leave women losing out.
Asking in the name of justice that access to something be equalized for both
genders presumes that the thing is important to the moral lives of men and
women in roughly the same way. Irigaray sees this presupposition as dangerous
for two reasons. First, positing a gender-neutral universal is likely an impossible
project.7 This is because women and men are (or should be allowed to become)8
irreducibly different from one another. The difference between them is deep—a
difference between kinds of subjects, not simply a difference between social
statuses or preferences. If women and men are different as moral beings, it is
unlikely that a single abstract model of moral and political life can represent
them both. Positing a single universal that encompasses both of them is likely
to privilege one of them. Second, if we ignore this fact and continue to look
for a gender-neutral universal, we are bound to draw on a particular repertoire
of existing symbols to articulate it. Our existing symbolic, metaphorical, and
legal configurations already privilege men. Thus, the so-called “gender-neutral”
universal is likely to unfairly privilege the masculine just as the symbolic context
from which it is culled does.
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The Logic of the Same
Irigaray has extensively analyzed the implications of the former claim—that
a gender-neutral universal is possible—in discussing what she calls “the logic
of the same.” Speculum of the Other Woman exposes a systematic tendency of
Western thought to subject anything that must be theorized to this logic. The
logic establishes the likeness of two things based on their mutual likeness to a
third thing. The third thing, however, is more like one of the two things than
the other, and this causes the second thing to appear as either more like the
standard of comparison than it is (even if this distorts the reality of the thing)
or less-than-same in relation to it.
Irigaray has most famously exposed this logic at work in her rendering of
Freud’s narrative of sexual development. Freud claims that normal sexual development involves the passing out of a pre-Oedipal stage in which the sexes are
undifferentiated since both occupy themselves with the masturbation of a penis
(1965, 139). The girls’ clitoris is a “penis equivalent.” For Irigaray, the effective reasoning here is that “the little girl is therefore a little man” (1985a, 26).
The little boy and the little girl’s sexual development both take place in relation to a third thing—the phallus. Yet the standard of comparison embodied in
the possession of the phallus is already a standard to which the boy conforms
more closely than the girl. In order to develop sexually, the girl appears either
as the same as the boy (possessing the penis in pre-Oedipal sexuality) or a
deficient boy (where her lack of a “real” penis comes to evident castration).
To put this point more broadly, the developmental model of phallic sexuality
that is supposedly applicable to both the boy and the girl is already structured
to make the girl appear deficient.
The validity of the use of this third term as a standard of comparison is never
up for debate. This is because the third term operates at a different ontological level from the first two. The first two terms are meant to be at the same
level, which warrants their potential interchangeability with one another. The
third term is ostensibly universal. The existence and status of the third term
differentiates Irigaray’s logic of the same from two similar logics: the logic of
the hierarchical dualism and the logic of normativity. Analyses of logics of
lateral hierarchy typically point out that two terms that supposedly function
at the same ontological level actually function at different ontological levels
in which one term is characterized as presence and the other as lack. Analyses
of logics of normativity typically point out that what appears to be a third,
universal term, is actually just another name for one of the two terms in a
dualistic lateral hierarchy.
Both the logic of lateral hierarchy and the logic of normativity identify
the universal with one side of a dualism. What is perhaps most innovative in
Irigaray’s thinking on the logic of the same is that the third term is not wholly
Serene J. Khader
53
identifiable with one of the two “lower” terms. Rather, the third term occupies
an equivocal place. It is simultaneously more closely aligned with the first
term than the second and not quite the same as the first. Key to its function as
universal is its appearance as an external standard to which both the first and
second terms are being compared.9 Although the universal third term presents
a standard to which the first term conforms more readily than the second, the
first term also appears to conform incompletely to the standard.
In the example of phallic sexual development above, the possession of the
phallus is the universal third term10—albeit an equivocal universal. Certainly,
possessing the phallus is a more realizable aspiration for the little boy than the
little girl. Yet the boy does not unambiguously possess the phallus either. His
development is motivated very heavily by castration—the fear that the phallus
will be taken away from him.
Thus, in the logic of the same both the first and second term appear as
imperfect realizations of a universal ideal. Articulated in this way, the logic
of the same is the logic of Platonic metaphysics, whose criticism is a central
part of Irigaray’s project.11 Universals are perfect and individuals are imperfect
instantiations of them. Since universals are conceptually prior to individuals,
incommensurabilities between the universal and individuals must always be
explained with reference to deficiencies in individuals. Irigaray describes this
logic as necessarily producing quantitative thinking. Rather than encouraging
us to isolate qualitative differences between individuals, this logic encourages
us to isolate quantitative ones. When the possibility of comparing the first two
terms to the third is never questioned, differences appear simply as deficits. In
Irigaray’s words, “all divergencies will finally be proportions, functions, relations
that can be referred back to sameness” (1985a, 247).
This quantitative logic is apparent in the example of phallic sexuality. The
boy possesses the phallus in a less than ideal form. The girl possesses the phallus in an even less than ideal form. Her genitals and her relationship to them
must be depicted as the tiny phallus, the absence of the phallus, or the gaping
hole where the phallus once was. In all of these, the girl is less than the boy.
Yet the apparent absurdity of comparing her to the little boy is obscured by
the implicit assumption that he is not universal either. It is preferable in this
logic to distort reality by turning the girl into a deficient boy than to dislodge
the single universal.
We can find the logic of the same at work in political equality claims as well.
Claims that women and men are equally entitled to some third thing appeal to
a quantitative logic. They attempt to elicit moral outrage because one group
has less of something than another group. Qualitative differences between the
treatment of women and the treatment of men either cannot appear as injustices or must be made quantitative. Within a context where the content of
the universal is not at stake, much can be lost in the translation of qualitative
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differences into qualitative ones. Subjecting qualitative differences to standards
of comparison that are not themselves subject to debate often involves distorting them. What appears unjust is someone’s lesser status vis-à-vis the universal,
and never the universal itself.
Equality claims also employ the logic of the same by asserting that women
and men are equally entitled to some third universal thing. The third thing is
meant to be universal, on the one hand, because its applicability to women is
presupposed. Insofar as its applicability to both sexes is presupposed, it is not,
in principle, identifiable with the moral life appropriate to either of them. On
the other hand, it must also be (or seem to be) the case in the status quo that
one sex possesses more of the third thing than the other. Otherwise, there would
be no grounds on which to represent the current situation as one of inequality
that needs to be remedied. In claims to equality, as in the Oedipal narrative, the
third thing to which both sexes aspire functions as both potentially universal
and already sexed.
We can distinguish three ways in which the logic of the same makes equality
claims dangerous. First, appeals to equality tend to reinstantiate the content
of old universals more than call them into question. They locate moral and
political concern at the level of the individual’s access to the universal rather
than at the level of the universal itself. Second, appeals to equality evaluate
individuals according to quantitative logics. Differences, when they appear,
must appear as inequalities. Inequalities are either natural deficiencies or
political injustices. Third, appeals to equality invoke universals as gender neutral. They raise what one sex has in the status quo to an equivocal/universal
status by making it seem a possible aspiration for every subject. This treats the
experiences of men and women as interchangeable. Assuming the desirability
of gender neutrality risks granting the false appearance of universality to what
may not legitimately be universal.
The Patriarchal Symbolic Context
The appearance of universality does not attach equally readily to the aspirations
of each sex. Rather, patriarchal power relations create a state of affairs where
the possibilities of the male sex appear as universal. One reason the aspirations
of the male sex are easier to represent as worthy universals is that, as Irigaray
argues, our patriarchal history has given men a near monopoly on the means of
symbolic self-representation.12 This effects a lack of affirmative representations
of women in our symbolic repertoire.
This insight about our available representational resources is key to Irigaray’s
second criticism of the structure of political equality claims. In addition to manifesting the logic of the same, equality claims tend to draw on representational
structures that tacitly privilege the masculine. Claims to gender equality ask us
Serene J. Khader
55
to compare the moral lives of women and men. In order to do so, we will use particular symbols, metaphors, and concepts to represent these experiences. To the
extent that equality claims typically appeal to existing legal structures or commonsense intuitions for their justifications, we can expect that they will deploy
conventional representations of women’s bodies and experiences. In a world
where women are subjugated, the most readily available conceptualizations of
women’s experiences are those that justify this subjugation. Comparing men’s
and women’s experiences is likely to make women come out seeming unworthy
if we see these experiences through the lens of patriarchal representation.
Central to Irigaray’s project is the idea that our symbolic context lacks nondegrading representations of women as women. This is not the place to fully
describe her theory of language and the symbolic, which both draws upon and
differs from Jacques Lacan’s theory of the symbolic as the register of linguistic
representation and exchange, but I sketch three of its central claims here.13
These are as follows: (1) that resources for representation reflect patriarchal
sociopolitical conditions, (2) that thought draws on an imaginary structure
that is always partly mythical, and (3) that the focus our culture places on the
figure of the father in negotiating identity discourages the symbolization of
women’s experiences.
Irigaray contends that sociopolitical conditions affect our access to means of
self-representation. Our linguistic and symbolic repertoires change in size and
scope according to what we need to communicate in our lives. For Irigaray, this
is the case for groups as well as individuals. She concludes from her empirical
research in linguistics that centuries of consignment to the reproduction and
care of the body has diminished the stock of symbols with which women can
represent themselves. Their lives in patriarchy have generated needs mostly for
means of symbolic exchange that allow them to talk about others or themselves
insofar as they serve others. She writes:
The assignment of reproduction and housekeeping to women
did not require them to have a very elaborate linguistic code,
especially after the children began to be educated at school. The
language of the female subject was thus reduced to the minimum.
Women were induced to speak of others—men and children—
and not of themselves. Their conversation included immediate,
concrete things, to do with preparing food and running the
household, for instance. In relationships with one another, the
only things that mattered were dressing to be attractive and
issues of childhood and bringing up children. These facets of
language are still evident in women’s speech. (1994, 48)
Men have not been in an analogous position; patriarchal culture has afforded
them life opportunities that require means of self-representation. As a result,
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most of the representations of women in circulation—particularly in the public
sphere—are not representations generated by women. They are representations
that reflect the needs and desires of men.
A second reason for the dearth of affirmative symbolizations of women’s experiences, according to Irigaray, is the extent to which we are beholden to a mythical imaginary. This mythical imaginary constitutes a set of background conditions
that determine how we will interpret and evaluate claims. The background
conditions include more than theoretical assumptions; they include a complex
of powerful images, unconscious pathologies, and empirical power relations that
allow some sets of representations to operate unchallenged and others to be challenged with disproportionate frequency. Accordance with the imaginary makes
some claims and representations appear more clear and intuitive than others.
Verbal communication is always “partly arbitrary, partly dependent on trust,”
and exchanges always have a “fundamentally hermetic” quality (1993b, 28).
The imaginary is mythic insofar as we obey without being conscious of it.
We do not question or interpret its foundations; rather, we interpret most representations with which we come into contact through it. Cultural formations
at the level of imaginary are mythic, “because they don’t stand back to question
themselves” and “take themselves to be the only order possible.” Their status is
not unlike that of divine ordering principles in whose absence the world would
unravel. We have little choice about whether to support them; “we live by,
exchange, and perpetuate” them “often without realizing” (23).
The imaginary is also mythic in that it expresses its fundamental conceptions
most fully in actual myths. This is not coincidental, since the founding of myths
establishes power, taking control over beliefs and subjecting them to a new order.
Myths have staying power that most types of ideologies do not. Western myths,
particularly those bequeathed to us by ancient Greece, were instantiated in a
period of violent transition from matriarchal to patriarchal culture.14 Because
of this, these myths function partly to represent the world—and women in particular—in a way that corroborates patriarchy. Irigaray often uncovers the traces
of Greek myths in contemporary representations of women. She demonstrates,
for example, the basis of the degradation of maternity to noncontribution in the
Oerestia (1993c, 11). She also suggests that the legal conception of children as
property begins in the myth of Persephone (1994, 108).
That we can find mythical traces in our contemporary conceptions suggests
for Irigaray (following Jacques Derrida) that symbols have histories—histories
that will often make our symbolic repertoire inadequate for describing the present and reinventing the future. Symbolic orders are difficult to change, and
this means that changes in our representational structures often lag far behind
changes in the world we inhabit. Our language is frequently better suited to
another (ancient, mythic) time than our own—“no longer rooted in reality
because of their repetitions of a vanished past” (48).
Serene J. Khader
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Irigaray also attributes our dearth of affirmative representations of women to
the process of individuation through which children pass in Western culture.
Children, according to most psychoanalytic accounts, begin life in an experience of unity with their mothers’ bodies. They have gestated within them during
pregnancy and usually continue to feed off them afterward. In this prelinguistic
stage, infants exist in a rare type of human relationship regulated by exchanges
of flesh and rhythms and fluids rather than language.
Ending this relationship is painful and difficult, but our culture denies the
difficulties of this individuation—instead theorizing healthy development as the
forgetting of the mother.15 Growing up means taking a place in the world of the
father; even to take up a position in the symbolic is to take on the father’s name.
The mark of belonging in the mother’s world, the umbilical scar, is replaced by
the mark of belonging in the father’s, the name (Irigaray 1993c, 14). In a world
where healthy development means entering the realm of the father, mothers
raise their children to belong to his world. They do not represent the motherchild relation to their children in language or images. This means that the
trauma of individuation from the mother cannot be worked through. Without
symbols or images through which the relation to the mother can be negotiated,
the child is utterly cut off—set adrift. To continue to identify deeply with her
would be to identify with a brute and unsymbolizable corporeity.
The developmental path of the fathers’ world doubly diminishes the possibility of nondegrading symbols for women’s bodily experiences. It discourages
women from metaphorizing distinctly female experiences such as pregnancy
and breastfeeding, and it prevents women from seeking a distinctly female
identity, because their health depends on disidentification from the mother.
The female body (especially in maternity) is the symbolic “ ‘dark continent’
par excellence” (Irigaray 1993c, 10). The culture that fails to symbolize the
maternal body is pervasive, and it leaves our repertoire of symbols for women’s
experiences impoverished.
The Fathers’ Rights Movement
and the Dangers of Equality Claims
The Context of the FRM
Irigaray warns that equality claims have dangerous potential. Opponents of
feminism are successfully capitalizing on it in the contemporary political scene.
The rhetoric of the FRM evidences this. What I call “the FRM” is actually a
loose constellation of movements that arose in response to the U.S. feminist
movement in the 1970s. The conception of male domination as a myth (Clatterbaugh 2000, 885) and the concomitant belief that abortion and family law
unjustly advantage women unite the various strains of this movement. Some
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of the movement’s political desiderata include the end of no-fault divorce,
mandatory consent of biological fathers’ for child adoption, the dismantling of
the U.S. child-support apparatus, and mandatory joint custody of children. The
FRM frequently, but not exclusively, articulates these demands as demands for
equality—for redress of the system in which women are supposedly privileged.16
Its supporters describe themselves as advocates of “shared parenting” (Fathers
and Families 2006) and “equal rights and responsibilities” (National Fathers’
Resource Center 2002–2006), and as opponents of “misandry” (DadsNow n.d.).
The FRM attempts to use both the legal system and the legislative process to
these ends, but here, I emphasize the movement’s public message. For although
the movement has had little success in courts and legislatures, it is very successfully using the media to promote the conceptualization of the family law and
abortion rights status quo as one that gives undeserved privileges to women.
I concentrate on the FRM’s message surrounding abortion rights, because it
represents an instance where sexual differences between men and women make
the invocation of a gender-neutral universal clearly problematic.
I focus here on two legal cases that have garnered considerable media attention. They were brought by men named John Stachokus (2000) and Matt Dubay
(2006). Dubay’s case, hailed by its proponents as “Roe vs. Wade for men,” (Associated Press 2006) involves a man who wants to be absolved of his obligation
to pay child support for a child he does not want. The organization representing him, the National Center for Men, declares that the situation in which
women can choose whether to bear children but men cannot choose whether
to support them evidences an unequal distribution of rights. Stachokus sought
a court injunction to prevent his ex-girlfriend, Tanya Meyers, from aborting
a fetus he had participated in conceiving. One of his central claims was that
he and the woman were in analogous positions vis-à-vis the fetus and that he
therefore had a right equal to the woman’s to decide its future.
The cases may seem not to belong to the same movement, because their
stated ends diverge significantly. After all, Dubay is renouncing his paternity
and Stachokus is claiming his. Stachokus’s demands require the nullification of
a woman’s right to bodily integrity, where Dubay’s do not.17 These differences
in the legal ramifications of these cases are real and worthy of serious attention.
However, my aim here is less to analyze the legal content (or legal merits) of
these cases than to examine their rhetoric. Differences in aim notwithstanding, the cases’ rhetorical strategies overlap significantly. The media strategies
of both plaintiffs depict the reproductive rights status quo as unfairly disadvantageous to men and employ degrading representations of women’s bodies and
experiences to this end.
Mainstream outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, CBS News, and BBC
News have prominently covered these cases. Dubay appeared on NBC morning talk show The View in 2006. At the time, he said he did not expect to win
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59
his case, but wanted “just to create awareness would be enough to get a debate
started” (BBC 2006). Both cases introduce—and make appear conventional—a
new way of conceptualizing a state of affairs in which women’s sexual partners
(or former sexual partners) lack the right to make abortion decisions.18 Their
portrayal of this state of affairs is meant to make it exert a specific moral claim;
it is a situation of inequality that must be redressed.
The FRM and the Logic of the Same
The FRM enlists the logic of the same in portraying the reproductive rights
status quo as unfairly advantaging women. As the quantitative logic dictates,
it transforms what could be symbolized as qualitative differences into quantitative ones. To fathers’ rights claimants, the exclusive granting of abortion
rights to women does not represent a qualitative difference between different
types of rights appropriate to different types of bodies. Someone has more and
someone has less. When we are speaking of goods the government is supposed
to distribute equally to every citizen, such as rights, for someone to have more
and another less is a moral problem.
This quantitative logic becomes transparent when the movement’s rhetoric
identifies the problem as women’s selfishness or unwarranted self-importance.
The National Center for Men describes Dubay’s case as asking “that women
be required to share reproductive freedom with men.” In other examples of
quantitative logic, “fathers’ rights” advocates describe a zero-sum game in which
women have everything and men have nothing. Dianna Thompson, executive director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, depicted
Stachokus’s situation as “a very sad case” where “the woman has the right to
choose” and “the man has no right to raise the child” (Sacks and Thompson
2002). A blog decrying the outcome in favor of Meyers in the Stachokus
case asked: “Women can deny men the right to fatherhood. Is this because
fatherhood is not as important as or not equal to motherhood?” (Margolis 2002).
The FRM invokes the logic of the same on a more fundamental level by
appealing to a gender-neutral universal. The coherence of the claim that it is
unjust for one person to have more of some good than another rests on the
truth of two more fundamental claims. The first is that each person is equally
entitled to the good. The second is that instances of the good are instances of
some one thing. If they are not conceivable as instances of some one thing,
then it is nonsensical to attempt to compare them in terms of more and less, as
Irigaray points out. For something to be measurable in terms of more and less
it must “kowtow to analogy” (1985a, 47).
As the logic of the same dictates, FRM proponents also refuse to attribute
incommensurabilities between the individual and the universal to deficits in
the universal. It does not appear, for example, that men lack the right to make
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abortion decisions because abortion rights are a universal that is inapplicable
to them. Rather, abstractly articulated “reproductive rights” could and should
belong to them. This is what allows them to represent themselves as victims
of inequality or deprivation.
Fathers’ rights advocates are able to insist that the universal is applicable to
them in principle by eliding the equivocal status of the universal—its closer
alignment with the aspirations of one sex than another. Just as the authority
of the Platonic form and the Freudian phallus originates in a metaphysical
source that is itself unintelligible, so does the authority of reproductive rights
derive exclusively from a set of a priori truths about human beings rather than
the needs of a particular class of individuals. The FRM capitalizes on this fact
by representing the relationship between being a woman and needing rights
surrounding pregnancy as radically arbitrary.
The movement portrays women and men as not different from one another
in any morally relevant way.19 The press release publicizing Dubay’s case exemplifies this. It reads, “Matt is asking for the reproductive choice he would have if
he were ‘Mattilda’ ” (National Center for Men 2006). This literally reduces the
difference between men and women to a difference between two names. That
Matt could have been “Mattilda” is taken for granted. This is to say nothing of
the implication that if he were Mattilda he would need the same “reproductive
choice” he needs as Matt.
Admittedly, the Matt/Mattilda comparison, if only because of the way it
is articulated, verges on silliness. Similar messages, however, are more subtle.
Some recast the right to abortion as a question of moral and epistemic authority.
They conceptualize possessing the right to make abortion decisions as a mark
of one’s considerability as a source of moral evaluations. Interestingly, in doing
so, they partially follow a path carved out by feminist abortion rights advocates.
Feminists often argue that the denial of the right to decide whether to have an
abortion to women is founded on a denial of their moral and epistemic authority.
Such arguments have achieved currency in public debates around abortion. For
example, some abortion rights advocates refer to laws mandating waiting periods before women have abortions as “’women are stupid’ laws.” The National
Abortion Federation distributes T-shirts with the slogan “We Trust Women.”
Fathers’ rights supporters’ discussion of moral and epistemic authority
diverges from that of feminist abortion rights advocates on a crucial point. One
way abortion rights advocates link the authority to make abortion decisions to
pregnancy is to argue that it gives women a privileged evaluative standpoint.
They claim that a pregnant woman is the ultimate authority on her own situation and relationship to a fetus because she has unique access to morally relevant
information about them. The embodied experience of pregnancy grants this
epistemic privilege, an experience for which there is no clear analogy in men.
Serene J. Khader
61
I will discuss the degradation of the experiences of pregnant women by the
FRM later. But this bears on the present discussion because it is precisely the
epistemic authority granted by the experience of pregnancy that many fathers’
rights advocates ignore when they make the epistemic authority to make abortion decisions a gender-neutral universal. Both sexes are equal and interchangeable as knowers, their argument goes, so how can women claim their knowledge
is special? One pro-FRM commentator interprets the refusal of the right to make
abortion decisions to men as a dismissal of men’s opinion on the basis of their
sex. He goes on to ask, “If men and women are equal, why is it that in the case
of abortion, the opinions of men and women are not equal?” (Margolis 2002).
Fathers’ rights proponents who address the pregnant body still depict a contingent relationship between pregnant embodiment and the right to make decisions about pregnancy. Some interpret the claim that an unintended pregnancy
can compromise a woman’s bodily integrity to mean that if a future child may
demand anything from one’s body, one has the right to make decisions about
whether it should come into existence. This interpretation trades on a broad
reconceptualization of bodily integrity in a way that considers men’s bodily
integrity to be at stake when women become pregnant. It is a common argument
from the FRM that men’s bodies are at risk in pregnancy just as women’s are
(Sacks and Thompson 2002). Their line of reasoning is that men must work in
order to support children, and work involves the surrender of the body. Some
apply the medical vocabulary of pregnancy and abortion indiscriminately to
men. Multiple sources refer the absolution from paying child support that Dubay
is seeking “male abortion” (Baby Center 2005; Esenberg 2006). Even the BBC,
one of the (few) news sources that did not use the language of Dubay’s press
release in its reporting described his position thus: “Men should have the same
rights as women in dealing with the consequences of unintended pregnancy”
(BBC 2006). This last sentence glaringly omits all information about in whose
body the pregnancy takes place.
The strategy of the FRM portrays men’s and women’s experiences as interchangeable. This is a prerequisite for the submitting of both of them to the
same universal as equality claims require. However, as Irigaray’s analysis of the
logic of the same reminds, when the universal masquerades as gender neutral, it usually more closely reflects the aspirations of one sex than the other.
The appearance of universality does not make this cease to be the case. The
appearance of universality allows this to be the case.
However, it may seem that there is an important sense in which the equality
claims of the FRM do not appeal to Irigaray’s logic of the same. The logic of the
same dictates that the purported universal is derived from the masculine—as
is the ideal of the possession of the phallus. But it may seem that the FRM is
demanding access to a universal that is in principle feminine—abortion rights.
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But it is not at all clear that this is the case. Rather than asking for the right
to terminate a pregnancy that occurs in one’s own body, the FRM seems to be
asking for rights whose exercise has historically been more possible for men
than women. These are, on the whole, the rights associated with paternity. Both
Dubay and Stachokus’s cases technically asked for versions of rights typically
granted to men by legal systems that conceptualize children as the property of
men. Stachokus claimed that he would be justified in coercing Meyers to carry
her pregnancy to term because the potential child in question was his. The
conception of fatherhood at work in Dubay’s case was financial.
Of course, Dubay and Stachokus have not emphasized the fact that they
were reclaiming the traditional rights of paternity. But they have not completely
hidden it either. Dubay’s press release stated explicitly that he was seeking
liberation from “being financially responsible” (National Center for Men
2006), and Stachokus’s advocates stated that he was being denied the right
to raise his own child. How, then, is it possible that they were able to invoke
the quantitative logic of inequality and say that they were asking for the same
rights as women? The answer lies in the equivocal status of the content of the
universal. In the same breath that fathers’ rights activists deploy the vocabulary
of traditional paternity they assimilate it to a universal that is abstract enough so
as to appear gender neutral. The organization representing Dubay sandwiched
being “forced to be financially responsible for choices only women are permitted to make” in an appositive clause between being “routinely forced to give
up control” and being “forced to relinquish reproductive choice as the price of
intimacy” (National Center for Men 2006). Stachokus’s advocates have insisted
that there is a fundamental similarity between Stachokus’s entitlement to “his”
child and Meyers’s entitlement to decide whether to have an abortion. Both
claims ostensibly constitute basic rights.
The abstraction of terms like reproductive freedom and basic rights allows the
rights of paternity to seem to belong to a larger class of universal rights. One of
Irigaray’s worries about the abstraction of the logic of the same is that subsuming
things under abstract universals usually requires distorting—not simply abstracting from—their realities. Within the logic of the same, mismatches between
individual and universal must be explained as deficiencies in the individual. In
the rhetoric of the FRM, the gender-neutral universal of reproductive freedom
requires distorting the reality of the feminine individuals subsumed under it.
The condition of female individuals becomes one manifestation of a universal
that is open to myriad manifestations. The conception of reproductive freedom
as a freedom that everyone is equally likely to be denied allows for the assimilation of being female to the possession of a name (Matt or Mattilda). It also
allows characterization of pregnancy as an instance of the claim to epistemic
authority or as an instance of general openness to exploitation of the body.
Serene J. Khader
63
The status of the universal the FRM invokes is complex. On one hand, the
FRM purports to take the situation of women in the status quo as a desirable
universal. On the other hand, the situation of women in the status quo is already
symbolized as masculine. Our response to the question of whether the FRM’s
universal is aligned more closely with the aspirations of feminine individuals
than masculine ones seems paradoxical. The entitlement these activists take
as universal is associated with women in the status quo, but still not feminine.
That is, even if reproductive freedom is associated in the status quo with women,
it is already symbolized as something to which men are more entitled.
The FRM and the Patriarchal Symbolic
Formally, assuming a gender-neutral universal implies nothing about which sex’s
aspirations that universal will more faithfully represent. But in an overarching
patriarchal context, we can expect that most representations will privilege
the masculine—even (or especially) representations of women’s experiences.
The FRM deploys equality claims to women’s detriment not only by appealing
to a gender-neutral universal but also by using patriarchal representations of
pregnancy and motherhood to fill out the content of that universal. It consistently enlists three representations of women that are inextricable from their
patriarchal histories: that of women as natural rather than cultural beings, that
of women’s bodies as property, and that of woman as the reproductive function.
The FRM applies representations of women as primarily subjects of nature
by employing the rhetoric of rights and duties. Irigaray distinguishes rights
from duties and reveals the association of the latter with women. For her,
rights have instrumental as well as moral significance; they obligate others to
protect the life activities of their bearers. In Hegelian fashion, she construes
rights as “objective mediations” that allow individuals to identify themselves
as part of the life of the public (2001, 83). Without rights that designate their
life activities as worthy, individuals’ demands for recognition “are no different
from a declaration of war” (10).
Duties, in contrast, impose obligations on individuals seemingly irrespective
of political culture. They appear to originate in nature rather than culture. The
obligation of women to produce and nurture children exemplifies this sort of
duty. Whether nature, the state, or some combination of the two charges women
with the production and nurturing of children; the performance of these tasks
appears in the symbolic primarily as the work of nature. This work of nature
achieves its fulfillment inside the family—an entity that does not appear as
a creation of the state but rather as a “natural or private coexistence” that
precedes it (56). When the tasks of procreation are articulated as duties rather
than left as inarticulate expectations, it is only to emphasize the appropriateness
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of women’s submission to nature. To be the subject of a duty is to be the type
of being for whom a natural teleology has already dictated an appropriate end.
According to Irigaray, woman, by virtue of being submitted to the demands of
nature rather than a moral universal, “is still subjected to the state of nature”
(42). Woman’s status primarily as bearer of duties effects this subjection.
Every woman is interchangeable with every other to the extent that she shares
this telos.
Insofar as duty is subjection to interchangeability and the natural teleology,
our symbolic context already marks duty as undesirable. Insofar as familial duty
is the duty par excellence, our symbolic context marks duty as feminine. The
FRM capitalizes on this conception of duty by highlighting the ways in which
women’s reproductive rights subject men to nature. Any subjection of men
to nature appears immediately inappropriate, because men are not the types
of beings to whom a natural teleology belongs, and because having familial
duties simply is subjection to a natural teleology. A situation in which men are
subjected to nature must be unjust.
It is a mantra of the FRM that women no longer have duties in reproduction,
but men do.20 As Sacks and Thomspon put it, “In America today, women have
rights and men merely have responsibilities.” This logic is evident in Dubay’s
case. His case analogizes the experience of paying child support not only to the
embodied experience of pregnancy, but also to caring for children. The rhetoric
of his supporters emphasizes that it is liberation from the vagaries of nature he
wants (National Center for Men 2006).
The representation of duties as more appropriate to women than men also
allows the FRM to portray men’s acceptance of child-rearing tasks appear as
especially praiseworthy. When women perform child-care duties they act in
accordance with their natures, but when men do so they sacrifice rights in order
to take on a lesser form of work. Obligatory for women is supererogatory for
men. Stachokus’s proponents relied heavily on representations of his desire to
raise a child as an act of benevolence. They represented him as an exceptional
man. “We talk about fathers negatively so often, how they do not want to be
responsible for their unborn children, and this guy is doing everything he can
to make sure his unborn child isn’t aborted,” Dianna Thompson, head of the
American Coalition for Fathers and Children, said in one interview (Whitehead 2006). In a column, Stachokus is “a stand-up guy who wants to live up to
what he sees as his responsibilities” (Sacks and Thompson 2002).
The FRM exploits the vocabulary of rights and duties to make men appear
disadvantaged in the status quo. Associating duties with women makes it seem
that men like Stachokus and Dubay are doing more than women by doing
work that is beneath them—and receiving less in return. The claim to equality founded on equal willingness to take on parental duties in Stachokus’s case
takes place in a context where moral worthiness attaches more readily to men’s
Serene J. Khader
65
parenting than to women’s. The claim to equality articulated as an equal right
to refuse subjection to nature—in addition to denying the specificity of pregnancy—appeals to a set of representations that formulate child nurturing as a
type of subjection and a representational context that makes the allocation of
duties to men appear as irreducibly unjust.
A second patriarchal representation of women the FRM’s rhetoric relies
on is that of women’s bodies—and the children they produce—as property.
Dubay’s case straightforwardly analogizes unwanted pregnancy to a deprivation of property. The “male pregnancy” to which he is supposedly subject is a
future of coerced child-support payments. One set of FRM proponents proffers
this disturbing image: “When the massive child-support apparatus hounds the
reluctant father for financial support, takes a third of his income, and jails him
if he comes up short, isn’t the government exercising control over his life?”
(Sacks and Thompson 2002).
Irigaray claims that this conceptualization of bodily subjugation as a deprivation of property is not coincidental. Our tendency to represent oppression as a
deprivation of property evidences the sedimentation of centuries of capitalist
and patriarchal legal codes onto our symbolic. “Our civil codes have accustomed
us to evaluate almost everything in terms of property including for the most part,
conjugal and parental love” (2001, 8). Not only can Dubay analogize unwanted
pregnancy to a financial burden because women’s bodies are already property
but his claim also already takes place in a context in which the obligations of
fatherhood have atrophied to obligations to provide property.
More generally, the rights we conceptualize as the rights of paternity are
inseparable from the logic of property. Indeed, the very notion that children—or
potential children—can unambiguously belong to their fathers originates in
material historical conditions that conceive the family as a vehicle for the passage of property. Irigaray agrees with Friedrich Engels’s argument in The Origin
of Property that monogamous marriage in which a woman’s children belong
to their father (usually meaning the man to whom she is married, even if his
genetic material does not produce her children) does not simply represent the
most natural or desirable way for human beings to organize childbearing and
child rearing. Rather, it is the result of a consolidation of power in male hands,
which secures the possibility of tracing inheritance rights through male lines.
Under conditions where the subjugation of women was not deeply rooted
in our sociocultural symbolic, Irigaray maintains, men’s claims to association
with children would immediately appear to us as less certain than women’s.
The indisputability of the maternity of children,21 and the special relationships
women develop with their biological children through sex-specific experiences like pregnancy and breast-feeding make women’s claims on children less
ambiguous than those of men. This does not mean that Irigaray thinks men
should have no relationships with children; she writes, “of course, fathers must
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keep some rights with regard to their children” (1994, 77). But it does mean
that men’s claims on children and fetuses would have to be mediated through
negotiation and relationship with the children’s mother.22
That Stachokus did not think of his relationship to the fetus as the product
of negotiation with Meyers is clear. By Meyers’s account, Stachokus’s relationship with her had reached a point beyond negotiation before he sought a legal
injunction that would force her to carry her pregnancy to term. This deterioration of the relationship between Stachokus and Meyers is perhaps unsurprising,
since court serves precisely when out-of-court negotiations have broken down.
It remains of interest, however, that Stachokus believed the judicial system
should affirm his right to the fetus regardless of his defunct relationship to the
woman carrying it. According to Meyers, Stachokus was an abusive romantic
partner. “He doesn’t want the baby, he wants me,” she remarked (Venesky
2002). Even if Meyers was wrong to attribute these intentions to Stachokus, his
claim to this particular use of her body did not derive from her consent. Even
more strikingly, most discussions of Stachokus’s case do not take her lack of
consent to be a problem. It seems that Stachokus’s claim on the use of Meyers’s
body could be legitimated in some way other than through her consent—that
an invocation of consent would be superfluous.
Interestingly, though the FRM presents children as property, it does not
represent them as the product of women’s labor. Indeed, FRM proponents insist
that the labor men do to earn money is more real than the labor of gestation
and childbirth. Commentators in support of the FRM highlight the differences in numbers of hours spent gestating and hours spent working to support
a child. Sacks and Thompson mobilize the vocabulary of workweeks and wages
to explain why “the sacrifices required to pay 18 years of child support should
not be discounted” (2002). Although it does not endorse this argument, an
article in Reason favorable to “fathers’ rights” notes that “one could argue that
21 years of child support is a greater burden than nine months of pregnancy”
(Young 2003).
Perhaps the labor of gestation appears so readily as trivial because our symbolic repertoire lacks affirmative representations of the labor of pregnancy.
Irigaray shows that the reduction of pregnancy to a function pervades our
symbolic order. One of her most famous claims is that women’s sexuality is
mostly unsymbolized in Western culture. In the words of her early work, female
pleasure constitutes an “elsewhere” that “has to remain inarticulate in language”
in order for the male sex’s representation of itself to keep coherent (1985b,
77). Since Irigaray first formulates this point as a criticism of Freud (who is
preoccupied with female sexuality), she cannot mean that women’s sexuality
is simply undiscussed in Western culture. She means that female sexuality is
symbolized only as devalued. She shows that the meaning that Freud seems to
think proceeds from the sex organs themselves actually proceeds from the fact
Serene J. Khader
67
that he has already assessed their use-value for the male. This is obvious in
Freud’s symbolization of the female genitals as “nothing to see.” More relevant
to the present discussion is Freud’s implicit subjection of the female sex organs
to a reproductive teleology. Freud goes most wrong, in Irigaray’s view, in his
failure to acknowledge the possibility that “the sexual function can be separated
from the reproductive function” (71).
Irigaray argues that this reduction of woman to the reproductive function
is omnipresent in Western culture. The reproductive function is just that—a
function. A function is primarily, as Drucilla Cornell writes, “for the use of
others” (1995, 85). It is not itself the source of evaluations—or more generally,
of value; others use it to produce value. Thus, as Irigaray notes, Western thought
conceives of man as producer and woman as reproducer—where woman reproduces man. This notion is traceable to ancient Greek theories of reproduction.
In the Oerestia, we learn that matricide is impossible, because no man has a
mother; nothing of his essential being was contributed by a woman. What we
call his mother was simply the place in which he developed.23 In Aristotle, we
read that woman contributes only undifferentiated matter to the production of
children (2004). The active male principle provides form. As Irigaray writes,
“sexual production-reproduction is referable to his activity alone. . . . Woman
is nothing more than the receptacle” (1985a, 18).
The assimilation of the female contribution to reproduction to noncontribution permeates the FRM. It is evident in the very logic of Stachokus’s appeal. He
insisted that the fetus in question belonged to him because he had participated
in his conception as much as Meyers. Admittedly, this was not his explicit claim.
Rather, his argument—and several iterations of it—were couched in egalitarian
language; the fetus was his as much as hers, because both of them had participated in conceiving it. But the very representation of conception as the source
of a claim on the fetus takes place on terms that devalue the feminine. For the
distinctly feminine contribution to the life of the fetus provided in its gestation
and birth cannot appear as a legitimate source of the claim to it if conception is
the exclusive criterion of legitimacy. Though Stachokus asserted he had an equal
claim to the fetus, he cited this fact as though it unequivocally implied that
his desires should trump Meyers’s. Some hidden premise about the superiority
of his role in conception must have been at work. An article in support of him
makes one such hidden premise explicit. “The child is the product of both of
their efforts,” the author writes, “with his historically understated in importance”
(Smerconish 2002, emphasis added).
The reduction of the pregnant woman to a function also evidences itself
linguistically. Fathers’ rights activists rarely, if ever, refer to what the pregnant
woman’s body does in gestation as the action of a subject. In fact, the pregnant
woman is usually conspicuously absent when the nine months between conception and delivery enter the conversation. It is literally as though the pregnancy
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does not take place in any person’s body. In the rhetoric of the FRM, the word
“pregnancy” is more likely to appear as an agent than the phrase “pregnant
woman.” The same article that contends men’s contribution to pregnancy is
devalued says that “when parents disagree as to whether to abort, the pregnancy
should go forth” (Smerconish 2002, emphasis added).
Depictions of pregnancy that do highlight the woman’s nurturing of the
fetus in her body do not escape the tendency to collapse the pregnant woman
into the reproductive function. They too trivialize the labor of gestation. But
they often do not need to make arguments or offer contorted analogies to make
the attribution of value to the work of gestation seem absurd. Just mentioning
gestation in public discourse seems to do the trick. Talking about gestation as
something a pregnant woman does stretches the limits of our existing representations. One of the only extant nontechnical words for the process of fetal
development inside a woman’s body is “gestation,” and yet this word can be
used interchangeably to refer to the development of the fetus and the woman’s
participation in it. One advocate of Dubay’s avers the ridiculousness of claiming that the pregnant woman’s gestation adds to the moral status of the fetus.
He writes sarcastically:
A child is created through the act of gestation, but what has
that got to do with a man? Men don’t have wombs. Men don’t
gestate, remember . . . ? Sex does not create children. Gestation
does. Only women gestate. Thus only women create children.
Thus only women have responsibilities for children. According to the logic of neo-science, and legal abortion, men aren’t
responsible for the creation of children. At all. Nada, zip, zero,
nothing, goose egg, empty set. (Kellmeyer 2006)
The author presupposes that it is less absurd to assume that provision of genetic
material constitutes reproduction than to assume that gestation and birth
constitute it.
The very possibility of conceiving the fetus and the pregnant woman as
engaged in some sort of important relationship seems unthinkable in the language of the FRM. The organization representing Dubay insists that removing
laws requiring child support from men who do not want children does not
disproportionately place burdens on women. It claims that women who cannot
afford to have children can have abortions. More interestingly, the organization’s director maintains that women who cannot afford to raise children and
do not want to have abortions can choose to give up their children for adoption
after birth just as easily as men can choose to abdicate financial responsibility
(Associated Press 2006). One wonders whether this comparison would be so
facile in a cultural context in which there were public symbolizations of the
subjective experiences of pregnant women. Could men represent reproduction
Serene J. Khader
69
as an experience of constitution rather than relation in a symbolic context
where narratives of women’s experiences with pregnancy were readily available?
The rhetoric of the FRM takes advantage of the elision of woman into the
reproductive function in our contemporary symbolic context. The ease with
which pregnancy as a unique subjective experience is excluded from the list
of morally relevant considerations in abortion decisions reflects the dearth of
affirmative representations of pregnancy in public culture. This allows the logic
of equality that “fathers’ rights” activists invoke to appear more coherent than
it actually is, since the symbolic context allocates the burden of proving that
men’s and women’s contributions to reproduction are not identical or analogous
to those who would conceptualize pregnancy as a unique, subjective condition.
When pregnancy cannot appear as a condition that affects a woman insofar as
she is a moral being, pregnancy is unlikely to be the type of experience about
which moral claims can legitimately be made.
The pervasiveness of representations of women as functions, property, and
subjects of nature rather than culture allows the FRM to manipulate the language of equality to its advantage. Such representations create a context where
equality claims take place on already unequal terms. The FRM can claim that
men have experiences analogous to pregnancy so easily, because representations valorizing the labor of pregnancy are not readily available in our symbolic
repertoire. It can take conception as an appropriate criterion for specifying
both sexes’ child “ownership” because our legal vocabulary conceives women
as property. It can assume that any subjection of men to nature represents a
problematic inequality, because man is already symbolized as the type of being
for whom subjection to nature is inappropriate.
Beyond Equality
The rhetoric of FRM dramatically illustrates the dangerous side of equality
claims. Appeals to gender equality risk perpetuating women’s subjugation,
because they analogize women’s and men’s experiences and because they often
do so without questioning deeply patriarchal representations of women.
This state of affairs in which equality claims are so susceptible to use for
antifeminist ends may seem to offer little hope to the feminist movement.
If equality claims require treating women’s experiences as exchangeable for
those of men and the only symbols we have for articulating those experiences
are degraded, in what terms can the demand for recognition of women’s moral
worth be made?
Irigaray proposes that we continue to advocate reproductive rights but
stop articulating them in the language of equality. According to her, women
should demand that the state articulate rights specifically for them—rights
that assert simultaneously that pregnancy and childbearing are uniquely
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Hypatia
female experiences and that the state should ensure their rights to negotiate
their subjective relationships to these experiences. Irigaray calls this “the right
to motherhood as a component of civil identity” (1994, 61). It includes the
right to bear children, to decide not to, to decide where and how many, and
to receive social support for one’s project of doing so. It replaces a purportedly
gender-neutral (but actually equivocal) universal with a sexed one—one that
attempts to be faithful to the lives of actual women. If we assume that women
will need specific rights because of their reproductive capacity, according to
Irigaray, we can throw a wrench in the machine that generates such pernicious
analogies between women and men.
But Irigaray’s insight offers a fruitful direction for thinking about reproductive rights even for those of us who do not want to abandon the language of
equality in our struggle to secure them. For her, right to motherhood contains
within it a call to create representations of women’s experiences of reproduction
that are less distorting and degrading than the ones we have now. I interpret her
demand for a right to motherhood as a component of civil identity as a right for
women to symbolize and metaphorize their own experiences of reproduction
so that the patriarchal symbolic cannot serve as the ultimate authority over
the meaning of women’s bodily experiences. To be able to symbolize women’s
experiences of reproduction in ways that do not implicitly justify their subjugation is a crucial task for the reproductive rights struggle—especially in a
political climate rife with depictions of women’s reproductive rights as “special”
and frivolous.
Notes
I thank Karen Burke, Luce Irigaray, Victoria Hesford, and Mary C. Rawlinson, and
Hypatia’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on various versions of
this paper. I dedicate this article to the memory of Karen Isabel Burke who helped me
develop the ideas in this article.
1. For a discussion of this argument see Nussbaum 2000.
2. Perhaps the most famous feminist articulation of suspicion of feminism’s of
difference is in Monique Wittig’s comment that difference is always “difference from”
men (1992). Feminisms of difference, according to her, cannot function to displace
men’s normativity
3. They would not be alone in this suspicion, given that commentators like Hirsch
and Olson (1996) refer to her “categorical rejection of a feminism of equality,” and
LeDoeuff (2003, 66) suggests that Irigaray’s philosophy cannot valorize gains made in the
name of equality, such as the entry of women into the public sphere, as political gains.
4. It is worth noting that Irigaray is not entirely consistent on this point. Sometimes, she seems to have changed her mind about the necessity of equality to possibilizing
difference (1993b, 84). However, I take Irigaray’s claim that she is no longer sure that
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71
equality can bring about difference to mean that in our historical moment equality claims
no longer serve this function, rather than that equality claims never served this function.
5. See Scott 1998 for further discussion of this point.
6. I do not mean to suggest that these criticisms are uncontroversially valid. Many
of Irigaray’s critiques of actual movements include some assumptions that feminists
should find very controversial. For example, she asserts that women leave the paid
labor force in large numbers because the work it provides is destructive to them. In her
words, entering the paid labor force causes women “to alienate their female identity”
(1993b, 85). My point here is that we can read criticisms of such policies as claims
that egalitarian movements have not gone far enough in bringing about equality. For
example, we might say that including women into the paid workforce has not caused
the concomitant valorization of dependency work that would be required to end the
subordination of women.
7. Irigaray does not argue that no gender-neutral universals are possible. She suggests, for example, that men and women are alike insofar as they are beings with basic
needs, such as food and shelter. She maintains, however, that men and women also have
different types of needs and possibilities worthy of state recognition.
8. Irigaray claims patriarchal culture has not yet allowed many of women’s differences from men to come into being. For a discussion of this idea, see Deutscher 2002.
9. Throughout 1985a, Irigaray notes that the universal appears to originate in a
mythic time outside of time even if it has an empirical origin in history.
10. The phallus is the paradigmatic example of the equivocal universal. The phallus
is masculine, but actual men cannot master it, so it appears as an ideal that is not simply
collapsible into maleness. It is also the equivocal universal par excellence, because the
origin of the mythic power that associates the penis and the phallus is never entirely
clear in Freud.
11. Irigaray argues explicitly against the famous third-man argument in the
Parmenides (1985a, 35).
12. Irigaray’s assertion that women are inadequately represented in the symbolic
reformulates Lacan’s claim that woman is unrepresentable. Irigaray disagrees with Lacan
about the reasons for this unrepresentability to the extent that she identifies patriarchy
as one of its causes. See “Cosi Fan Tutti” (1985b), for Irigaray’s remarks about Lacan.
See Weed and Schwab (in Burke, Schor, and Whitford 1994) for further analysis of the
relationship between Irigaray and Lacan’s understandings of the position of woman in
the symbolic.
13. See Irigaray 1996 and 1985b for an elaboration of her understanding of the
patriarchal symbolic. Compare to Lacan 2007. Put very roughly, Irigaray’s conception
of the symbolic shares with Lacan a conception of language as a system of signifiers that
the subject cannot master, that allocates different positions to subjects based on sex,
and that deeply problematizes subjects’ access to the field of pretheoretical experience.
14. Irigaray describes the work of Sophocles as marking “the bridge between
patriarchal and matriarchal culture” (1985a, 217).
15. For a discussion of this process of moving from the mother’s to the father’s world
in psychic development, see Schwab in Burke, Schor, and Whitford 1994.
16. For an analysis of FRM claims made in the name of difference rather than equality,
see Cornell 1998.
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Hypatia
17. Women’s rights are still at stake in Dubay’s claim—even if their rights to bodily
integrity are not. For example, if child-support laws were to become less exacting and
the state did not replace child support with another entitlement, women’s capacity to
head families would be significantly damaged.
18. Of course, it is not entirely true that in the status quo women’s sexual partners
have no legally sanctioned authority over women’s abortion decisions. Spousal consent
and notification laws resurface in state legislatures with surprising frequency. Also, the
prevalence of parental consent and notification laws for pregnant teenagers often allow
perpetrators of incest to decide the fates of their daughters’ bodies.
19. Shanley (1995, 82–83) claims that the fathers’ rights advocates of paternal
adoption rights also use the rhetoric of equality and gender neutrality in misleading
ways that obscure the experience of gestation and the asymmetry of men’s and women’s
relationships to newborns.
20. Collins (2000) has argued that fathers’ rights cannot be meaningfully conceptualized outside of an analysis of the duties they impose on women.
21. Technological developments have made it so that the maternity of children is
more disputable in the past with the advent of practices such as surrogate motherhood.
22. Irigaray suggests that we should think of the father as “the mother’s partner in
love” (1994, 77). Although she does not specify what this means, this characterization
is open to criticism on the grounds of idealism and heteronormativity. What I wish
to emphasize here, though, is Irigaray’s idea that men’s claims on children and fetuses
ought not to be conceptualized independently from their relationships to the women
that bear them.
23. Irigaray offers a very detailed analysis of woman’s status as place in 1993a.
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