Cixous begins by arguing that "[t]hought has always worked by opposition" (90), by "dual, hierarchized oppositions" (91). "Wherever an ordering intervenes, a law organizes the thinkable by (dual, irreconcilable; or mitigable, dialectical) oppositions" (91). She contends that the fact that "logocentrism subjects thought . . . to a two-term system" (91) is "related to ‘the’ couple’ man/woman" (91). This is true for the "ensemble of symbolic systems--art, religion, family, language" (91).

However, Cixous stresses that the "movement by which each opposition is set up to produce meaning is the movement by which the couple is destroyed. A universal battlefield. Each time a war breaks out" (91), whether it be the relationship of authority inherent in the father/son couple (or binary), that of violence in the logos/writing couple or the master/slave. The hierarchy "always subjects the entire conceptual organization to man. A male privilege, which can be seen in the opposition by which it sustains itself" (91).

Indeed, the question of sexual difference is closely linked to the opposition between masculinity and passivity, which is the "orchestrator of values" (91) throughout the history of philosophy. Woman is always on the side of passivity: for example, in kinship structures. "Either the woman is passive; or she doesn't exist. What is left is unthinkable, unthought of" (92). Cixous argues that

we can no more talk about ‘woman’ than about ‘man’ without getting caught up in an idelogical theater where the multiplication of representations, images, reflections, myths, identifications constantly transforms, deforms, alters each person's imaginary order and in advance, renders all conceptualizations null and void. (96)

Woman remains a male-dominated space "always virginal, matter subjected to the desire that he wishes to imprint" (92).

The "philosophical constructs itself starting with the abasement of woman. Subordination of the feminine to the masculine order . . . appears to be the condition for the functioning of the machine" (92). "To the extent that it signifies, literature is commanded by the philosophical" (92), she argues. It is always the same old story: literature "all refers back to man to his torment, his desire to be (at) the origin. Back to the father" (92).

Cixous argues that the

(political) economy of the masculine and the feminine is organized by different requirements and restraints, which, when socialized and metaphorized, produce signs, relationships of power, relationships of production and reproduction, an entire immense system of cultural inscription readable as masculine and feminine. (93)

Cixous wants to avoid falling into the anatomical essentialism of Freud and Ernest Jones who both ultimately came to "support the awesome thesis of a `natural,' anatomical determination of sexual difference-opposition" (93) and thus to "support phallocentrism's position of power" (93). She summarises Freud's position on feminine sexuality: femininity is a result of anatomical defectiveness. The libido is conceived as active and male in both sexes. Sexual differentiation occurs only at the phallic phase. The first love object being the mother, it is only for the boy that love of the opposite sex is natural. For Jones, on the other hand, femininity consists of an autonomous essence: the little girl has naturally a feminine desire for the father. Both end up, however, supporting phallocentrism. In the process, "bisexuality vanishes into the unbridges abyss that separates the opponents here" (94).

Cixous' point is that Freudians start from the "anatomical difference between the sexes . . . the difference between having/not having the phallus" (95) (which Lacan will describe as the transcendental signifier). She argues that in this schema sexual difference is articulated by reference to a "fantasized relationship" (95) to physiology, a "voyeur's theory" (95) that accords a "strange importance . . . to exteriority and to the specular in the elaboration of sexuality" (95). For Cixous, on the other hand, sexual difference is clearest at the level of sexual pleasure (jouissance) with the result that "woman's libidinal economy is neither identifiable by a man nor referable to the masculine economy" (95). Cixous replaces Freud's famous question `What does she want?' with her own: "‘How do I experience sexual pleasure?’ What is feminine sexual pleasure, where does it take place, how is it inscribed at the level of her body, of her unconscious? And then how is it put into writing?" (95).

As a result of challenges to it, the "stability of the masculine edifice which passed itself off as eternal-natural" (92 is threatened. Cixous asks: "What would become of logocentrism, of the great philosophical systems, of world order in general if the rock upon which they founded their church were to crumble?" (92-3). Indeed, the "logocentric project had always been, undeniably, to found [fund] phallocentrism" (93). The result of this "period when the conceptual foundation of a millenial culture is in process of being undermined by millions of a species of mole as yet not recognized" (93) is that "all the stories would have to be told differently, the future would be incalculable, the historical forces would, will, change hands, bodies; another thinking as yet not thinkable will transform the functioning of all society" (93). Cixous points out that one can theorise, as a man called Bachofen once did, a matriarchal prehistory, but the fact remains that "Phallocentrism is. History has never produced, recorded anything but that" (96). There is no such thing as destiny, nature or essence: only "living structures, caught up, sometimes frozen within historico-cultural limits which intermingle with the historical scene to such a degree that it has long been impossible and is still difficult to think or even to imagine something else" (96). At present, however, Cixous argues, we are living through a "transitional period--where the classical structure appears as if it might crack" (96). "Phallocentrism is the enemy. Of everyone. Men stand to lose by it, differently but as seriously as women. And it is time to transform. To invent the other history" (96).

Indeed, Cixous argues that there is

no need to exclude the possibility of radical transformations of behaviour, mentalities, roles, and political economy. The effects of those transformations on the libidinal economy are unthinkable today. Let us imagine simultaneously a general change in all of the structures of formation, education, framework, hence of reproduction, of ideological effects, and let us imagine a real liberation of sexuality, that is, a transformation of our relationship to our body (--and to another body). (96-7).

In this way,

‘femininity,’ ‘masculinity,’ would inscribe their effects of difference, their economy, their relationships to expenditure, to deficit, to giving, quite differently. That which appears as ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ today would no longer amount to the same thing. The general logic of difference would no longer fit into the opposition that still dominates. The difference would be a crowning display of new differences. (97)

Cixous sounds a warning note in this respect: "we are still floundering about--with certain exceptions--in the Old order" (97). These exceptions are the androgynous and/or the bisexual who refuse to let themselves

be reduced to the state of coded mannequins by the relentless repression of the homosexual component. Men or women, complex, mobile, open beings. admitting the component of the other sex makes them at once much richer, plural, strong, and to the extent of this mobility, very fragile. We invent only on this condition: thinkers, artists, creators of new values, ‘philosophers’ of the mad Nietzschean sort, inventors and destroyers, of forms, the changers of life cannot but be agitated by singularities--complementary or contradictory. (97)

This is because there is

no invention possible, whether it be philosophic or poetic, without the presence in the inventing subject of an abundance of the other, of the diverse: persons-detached, persons-thought, peoples born of the unconscious, and in each desert, suddenly animated, a springing forth of self that we did not know about--our women, our monsters, our jackals, our Arabs, our fellow-creatures, our fears. (97)

We are each a "crystallized work of my ultrasubjectivities" (97), each a "concert of personalizations called I" (97).

In Gayle Rubin's view, it is the incest taboo which initiates the exchange of women and which thus constitutes the origin of society (or human culture, as opposed to nature). She prefers the term sex/gender system to the terms 'mode of reproduction' and 'patriarchy' because the former seems to imply that a particular sex/gender system is the reproductive moment of a given mode of production, and the latter because it is too much of a monolithic term which ignores specificities ("it is important . . . to maintain a distinction between the human capacity and necessity to create a sexual world, and the empirically oppressive ways in which sexual worlds have been organized" (168). Rubin rejects the Marxist model as an explanation of the oppression of women. While it may serve to explain the usefulness of women to capitalism in terms of the unpaid housework which they perform and which contributes significantly to the surplus value which is extracted out of the wage-labour of workers (the sine qua non of capitalism), it does nothing to explain the oppression of women in societies which predate or exist outside of capitalism.

Rubin uses the term 'sex/gender system' to denote the the process by which the "biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention" (165). In other words, sex "as we know it--gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, concepts of childhood--is itself a social product" (166). The two pre-Oedipal androgynes, anatomically distinguished into male and female, sit on the border of biology and culture. The Oedipal complex consists really of the acquisition of certain pieces of information: children discover the differences between the sexes and the duty imposed upon them of becoming a gender. Understanding the sex/gender system as constituted of the exchange of women is, in Rubin's view, an initial step towards building an arsenal of concepts with which sexual systems can be understood and described: women's subordination can be seen to be the consequence of and coterminous with the traffic in women (rather than the traffic in merchandise, hence the inadequacy of purely Marxist models of society for feminist purposes). What we need, therefore, is a "political economy of sexual systems" (177) in order to "determine the exact mechanisms by which particular conventions of sexuality are produced and maintained" (177).

Rubin argues that kinship systems "are observable and empirical froms of sex/gender systems" (169). Levi-Strauss' understanding that any kinship system is centred around the exchange of women between men locates the oppression of women within social systems rather than biology. Any kinship system is an "imposition of social ends upon a part of the natural world" (176). Men do not merely exchange women: they also "exchange sexual access, genealogical statuses, lineage names and ancestors, rights and people . . . in concrete systems of social relationships" (177) which always include certain rights from men and others for women. Implicitly, women do not possess full control over themselves and their bodies. Levi-Strauss concludes that the sexual division of labour is not the effect of biological specialisation--i.e. sexual roles did not evolve with respect to the physiological capabilities of each sex. In this respect, function is more important than origin: the sexual division of labour is one designed to ensure and perpetuate a state of dependency between the sexes. The result is the erection of taboos concerning the sameness of the sexes and the exacerbation of biological differences in the construction of gender roles. Indeed, far from being an "expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities" (180), a process that requires the repression of feminine traits that inhere in men and vice versa. The incest taboo, compulsory heterosexuality, the assymetric division of the sexes and the constraint of female sexuality are all integral to the kinship system. Each individual, consequently, must become acculturated to the gender roles that are integral to his or her community: each "new generation must learn and become its sexual destiny, each person must be encoded with its appropriate status within the system" (183).

Many feminists have opposed Freudian psychoanalysis, centered around the notions of castration and penis envy, on the grounds that it prioritises the anatomy and biological determination. What these critics fail to understand, Rubin correctly contends, is precisely what Lacan's rethinking of Freud makes available: the privileging of the penis is really a question of conceptions, rather than perceptions, that is, of attributed significations--the perceived inferiority of the female genitalia is the product of the situational context. Lacan de-biologises Freud: he conceives of Psychoanalysis as a theory of information rather than organs. According to Lacan, Freud meant to say little about anatomy per se and more about language and the cultural meanings imposed upon anatomy. The penis, for example, is not the subject of Psychoanalysis, but the phallus is, that is, that set of meanings conferred by society upon the penis.

Psychoanalysis explains, without, it should be stressed, rationalising, the mechanisms by which children are engraved with the conventions of sex and gender and thus accounts for the reproduction of kinship. It describes the residue left within individuals by their confrontation with the rules and regulations of sexuality of the societies to which they are born. Lacan's rethinking of Freud in the light of Levi-Strauss offers the basis for a radical critique of the process by which gender and sexual roles are acquired: for Lacan, psychoanalysis studies the traces left in the psyches of individuals as a result of their inscription into systems of kinship, that is the "culturalization of biological sexuality on the societal level; psychoanalysis describes the transformation of the biological sexuality of individuals as they are enculturated" (189). According to his schema, the Oedipal crisis occurs "when a child learns of the sexual rules embedded in the terms for family and relatives. The crisis begins when the child learns his or her place in it" (189) and resolved when the child "accepts that place and accedes to it" (189). For Lacan, the male organ plays a dominant role to the extent that its absence or presence transforms an anatomical difference into a major classification of humans. It is really a question of possessing, or not, the phallus: castration "is not having the (symbolic) phallus. Castration is not a real 'lack,' but a meaning conferred upon the genitals of a woman" (191). As Lacan put it, castration "may derive support from . . . the apprehension of the absence of the penis in women--but even this supposes a symbolization of the object, since the real is full, and `lacks' nothing. Insofar as one finds castration in the genesis of neurosis, it is never real but symbolic" (Lacan quoted in Rubin, 191). Moreover, the presence or absence of the phallus creates the differences between the two sexes at the same time that it also implies the dominance of men over women.

Since the girl has no phallus, she has no right to the mother. She comes to conclude that the 'penis' is indispensable for the possession of the mother because only those who possess the phallus have a right to the mother and to the power inherent in the capacity to order exchange. "She does not come to her conclusion because of the natural superiority of the penis in and of itself . . . The hierarchical arrangement of the male and female genitals is a result of the definitions of the situation" (194). When she recognises her castration, she accedes to the place of a woman in the phallic echange network. At the same time, she recognises the futility of her active desire and repersses her clitoral eroticism for vaginal passivity (note that in attributing an active/passive opposition to the clitoris and vagina respectively, cultural stereotypes have evidently been mapped on to the genitals). The girl's libidinal structure and object choice are now congruent with the female gender role and she is now a little woman, feminine, passive and heterosexual.