Exceeding Hegel and Lacan: Different Fields of Pleasure within Foucault and Irigaray

Anglo-American embodiments of poststructuralist and French feminism often align themselves with the texts of either Michel Foucault or Luce Irigaray. Interrogating this alleged distance between Foucault and Irigaray, I show how it reinscribes the phallic field of concepts and categories within feminist discourses. Framing both Foucault and Irigaray as exceeding Jacques Lacan's metamorphosis of G.W.F. Hegel's Concept, I suggest that engaging their styles might yield richer tools for articulating the differences within our different lives.