Gender Relations as an “Irreducible Alterity”

Abstract

The fundamental critique on biological and essentialist statements about gender goes to the merit of constructivist theory. However, the problem preceding identity construction, the epistemological dimension, has been largely suppressed. Beginning with this problematic, Anke Drygala’s book explains the conditions and possible perspectives of approaching a “thinking of difference” between genders and how, for example, this thinking is utilized by the philosophers Geneviève Fraisse and Luce Irigaray. While Geneviève Fraisse introduces the term “gender difference,” with which gender relations as such become the object of study, Luce Irigaray supposes gender relations to be a site of “irreducible alterity,” in which the genders are not confronted with one another as same or different, but instead recognize one another in their respective differentness as incomprehensible and intangible.