Visibility and Invisibility, Silence, Absences

Abstract

Irigaray argues in This Sex Which Is Not One that, as language is patriarchal, in order to speak, women must speak in a language which alienates them and distances them from themselves. As language speaks the body, and as speakers are embodied, this silence is simultaneously an absence, and women are unable to express their embodiment in language. There is no space for the articulation of women’s bodies within patriarchal language, where women are constituted as a ‘lack’ within a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, which Irigaray has strongly contested. Not only does Lacan claim that language speaks us and we are spoken rather than speak, but also that the key signifier of meaning is the phallus (Lacan, 1977). This absence from the imaginary is applicable to language and its relation to the body, and also to imagery and the question of visibility, and what is therefore rendered invisible and absent. This is the focus of this chapter. Here, we consider the relationship between silence, absence and invisibility in terms of how women’s bodies are represented and how this links to how women see themselves and their ability to express this through words. A focus on invisibility may seem somewhat surprising given that, in the contemporary climate, there is a proliferation of representations of women’s bodies seen in any brief perusal of a magazine rack of popular magazines and newspapers, on the web and in film and television. However, this same explosion of sexualised images of women, we argue, can be seen as part of the reiteration of ‘sameness’ that Irigaray identifies in the quote that we have selected to open this chapter.

If we keep on speaking sameness, if we speak to each other as men have been doing for centuries, as we have been taught to speak, we’ll miss each other, fail ourselves. Again … Words will pass through our bodies, above our heads. They’ll vanish, and we’ll be lost. Far off, up high. Absent from ourselves: we’ll be spoken machines, speaking machines. Enveloped in proper skins, but not our own. Withdrawn into proper names, violated by them.

(Irigaray, [1977] 1985: 205)