Their liberation requires stipulating universal norms. While Nussbaum situates herself within the language of rights and human capacities, she too insists that male dominance is universal and universally experienced by all women. Woman is produced through this process as an object whose only purpose is to gratify men. Sexuality is a social process that creates and directs desire. Under patriarchy, all women share a common essence-sexuality. MacKinnon insists that gender difference is a socially constructed concept invented to sustain male dominance. Two lips provide the basis for a speaking (as) woman, to articulate a feminine imaginary. Irigaray employs the metaphor of the labia two lips, always two, not divisible into one neither one nor two. For Irigaray, this essence can never be one it does not conform to the unitary logic of homo-centric discourse. Women have never articulated their own difference, among themselves and for themselves. Woman's essence has been defined by men, as not-man or lesser man. Irigaray argues that the problem is not that woman has been conceived in essentialist terms but rather the content of those terms. Other theorists such as Luce Irigaray, Catharine MacKinnon, and Martha Nussbaum also deploy a feminist essentialism.
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