Luce Irigaray

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist philosopher and linguist who argues that Western philosophy and language are structured around a male-centred perspective that erases sexual difference. Her work Speculum of the Other Woman offered a sustained critique of Freud and the Western philosophical tradition.

Irigaray's concept of the "specular economy" — that Western thought defines woman as the mirror of man rather than as a subject in her own right — combines close readings of philosophical texts with psychoanalytic theory. Her later work on sexual difference, divine women, and a feminine divine proposed affirmative alternatives to patriarchal metaphysics.