The Box-assemblage and Luce Irigaray’s Écriture Feminine

Abstract

DOI: 10.19251/sej/2018.8(4.1)

Abstract

Taking its cue from Luce Irigaray’s écriture feminine, and prompted by a desire to create an exclusive space where libidinal desires are freed from societal inhibitions, Idoia and myself, as model and artist re-spectively, set out to create a particular kind of artefact. This takes the form of a mixed-media, box-assemblage within which lies an indeterminate territory where the self encounters the other through an eq-uitable relationship, unhindered by male-dominated knowledge. With an iconography imbued with liturgi-cal as well as profane tropes, and drawing heavily on Irigaray’s notion of the ‘sensible transcendental,’this structure exploits that which lies beyond female corporeality [Irigaray, 1993, p. 115, 129]. Its aesthetics, while encouraging disengagement from preconceived dogmas and the dissolution of sexual difference, en-hances the experience of its deific symbolism. By correlating her body with the divine, the box-assemblage gives this woman a trans-corporeal identity.

Not unlike the enigmatic realm outlined in Iragaray’s La Mystérique, the box-assemblage provides an ideal platform where Idoia expresses her uniqueness, primarily through high-definition simulacra pro-duced from moulds taken directly off her skin; as for myself, my representation takes place primarily through the agency of her otherness [Irigaray, 1985, p. 191- 202].This kind of artefact grants us a space within which we not only re-assess concepts of alterity and selfhood, but challenge the dominant role of male subjectivity. Just as Irigaray’s prose disrupts Jacques Derrida’s phalloegocentrism, the box-assemblage dismisses the traditional status of woman-as-commodity.

Keywords: artist, écriture feminine, Irigaray, model, otherness, subjectivity, sensible transcendental