Sexually Transforming Salvation: a Reading of Luce Irigaray's Insistence on Sexual Difference
Authors
VanderBerg, NatasjaAdvisors
Olthuis, James H.Affiliation
Institute for Christian StudiesIssue Date
2005-12
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This thesis suggests that Luce Irigaray's recent focus on spirituality in 'Luce Irigaray: key writings' makes explicit themes already suggested by her career-long insistence on the importance of sexual difference. It traces Irigaray's imagination of a dynamic, life-giving duality of sexual difference, suggesting that Irigaray's sexual difference displaces western philosophy's division between the natural and the spiritual; the earth and the sky; and mortals and the divine. In Irigaray's philosophy, cultivating sexual difference between men and women is the key to relinking the natural and the spiritual. This thesis calls this re-linking a religious task.Within this broad project, emphasis is placed on Irigaray's insistence that in order for sexual difference to be our redemption, women need to attend to creating a spiritual world appropriate to our own natural world. Indispensable to this project is the cultivation of a genealogy of mother-daughter relationships. This thesis explores this theme in Irigaray by discussing Drucilla Cornell's book, 'Legacies of dignity: between women and generations', as an Irigarayan genealogical exercise.This thesis also explores Irigaray's demand that western culture rethink its understanding of God. She suggests that we cultivate a sense of the divine as 'sensibly transcendent.' In order to highlight the distinction between Irigaray's divine and a monotheistic, transcendent God, this thesis turns to Patricia Huntington's article 'Contra Irigaray: the couple is not the middle term of the ethical whole.'The concluding chapter explores Irigaray's reworked notions of incarnation and salvation.Throughout these explorations, this thesis holds that Irigaray's re-integration of the natural and the spiritual will promote more ethical living -- with others, our selves, the earth and the divine.Publisher
Institute for Christian StudiesType
ThesisLanguage
enRights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/Rights holder
This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner.Degree Title
Master of Arts (Philosophy)Collections
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