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Luce Irigaray's thinking through of intersubjectivity in terms of the relations between two sexuate subjects raises the question, as Gail Schwab suggests, of thinking through sexuate difference as a global model for ethics.¹ In this chapter, I turn to Gayatri Spivak's work in order to meditate further on the possibility of thinking through an Irigarayan-inspired ethics of sexuate difference in our contemporary global contexts. How can we articulate a universal ethics of sexuate difference? What issues does this raise for structuring relations between and among women? How do we communicate cross-culturally between traditions in a way that, as I argue elsewhere, Luce Irigaray attempts to do in Between East and West?² With these questions in mind, this chapter examines how Spivak mobilises Irigaray's work on sexuate difference to address women's solidarity and what this suggests about the possibility of cross-cultural communication between and among women.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40427-1_9

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