The Spaces Between Us: Female Affiliation/Irigaray/Audre Lorde

Faith: One of the gifts you have given me is Luce Irigaray - much more of Irigaray than I ever knew before. Especially the political and practical Irigaray - and the spiritual.

In our work together we are foregrounding the importance of affective relations in our collaboration and affiliation with women and with diverse groups of people, because we know that it is only in daily practice that we can begin to understand and work productively with the differences between ourselves and others.

In Luce Irigaray's important philosophical and practical writings, she identifies sexual difference as perhaps the most vital issue to be addressed if we are to have a future of a civil society, love, and a creative culture built between men and women. In "I love to You" she states: "Marx defined the origin of man's exploitation of man as man's exploitation of woman and asserted that the most basic human exploitation lies in the division of labor between man and woman. Why didn't he devote his life to solving the problem of this exploitation? “ she asks.

Much of the work (that Marx didn't do) on the gendered division of labor and women's unpaid and invisible affective maintenance work has been done and is being done by for example radical Italian feminists as well as other theorists and artists including yourself (Irina) and the cyberfeminist cultural producers subRosa.

The labor woman has traditionally done for all humans is the labor of affect, of human affiliation, of creating and maintaining human life and civil relations. This labor of love is necessary to creating spaces between us in which we acknowledge our becoming, and our alliance in a civil society in which we can - in Irigaray's words - "be happy now." This labor needs to be shared by men and women alike so that no one will be sacrificed for the good of others.