Redeeming Sexual Difference: Stigmata, The Messenger and Luce Irigaray's Bleeding Woman (Critical Essay‪)‬

To affirm in full positivity the existence and capacities of (at least) two sexes--the project of sexual difference--is to acknowledge two things: first, the failure of the past to provide a space and time for women as women, with the consequence that all forms of prevailing practices and forms of knowledge represent the interests and perspectives of only one sex. Second, linked to this recognition is the necessity, in the future, of providing other ways of knowing, other ontologies and epistemologies that enable the subject's relation to the world, to space and time, to be conceptualized in different terms ... Irigaray understands this as a becoming beyond the one, beyond the phallic, a becoming in which the all-too-human is understood as the all-too-patriarchal, and the future is beyond recognition, beyond the dualities of the sexes as we know them today and as they existed in the past. (1) Elizabeth Grosz, "The Force of Sexual Difference"