Modern Perspective Irigaray's Female Discourse Theory Reconstruction

Luce Irigaray, who is a contemporary French idiomatical feminism theorist, studies and absorbs Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Linguistic, Deconstructionism, etc. Therefore, her views of feminist criticism is creative use of post-modernist theory. Her poetic theory impacts every branches of feminism greatly and promotes the diversification and open development of feminism. However, there is no systematic study of Irigaray's theory currently, and this paper focuses on the comprehensive collation of her theory.Four parts are included in the paper:The first part focuses on Irigaray and western faminism. Irigaray and her works are briefly introduced. According to the early research of western feminism, Irigaray chose to create experimental text. Irigaray's theory is the inheritance and development of western feminism.The second part is mainly about Irigaray's criticism of male discourse. Thorough the criticizing of man discourse, Irigaray found the basics of criticism about the formation of feminism, namely:identity criticism, universality criticism and essentialism criticism.The third part discusses the conceiving of Irigaray's female discourse. Based on the criticizing and inheriting of Lacon's theories, Irigaray deconstructed the unitary of body language, and constructed multivariate interpretation of female bodies; Then relying on Derrida's theory, Irigaray deconstructed binary opposition and recognized gender differences and at last constructs female pedigree; Inspired by Foucaul's discourse-power theory, Irigaray pointed out that female must construct their own discourse world, and only if they have the discursive power, can they construct their own discourse center.The forth part mainly studies the significances and limitations of the reconstruction of female discourse by Irigaray. Her main contribution is to investigate the root of the inequality of male and female, exploring methods to achieve gender equality and to construct female discourse. Meanwhile the primary drawbacks of her theory are that she opposes essentialism which brought her prison and the lack of political practice of her feminism theory.