  Irigaray characterizes her own project as taking place in three stages: first, deconstructing the masculine subject; second, figuring the possibility for a feminine subject; and third, construing an intersubjectivity that respects sexual difference (Irigaray 1995a, 96). Sexual difference, in her view, is not a system of domination to be overcome but a cultural process and practice to be achieved and nourished; the actual relations of domination and subordination that characterize Western politics, society, history, literature, language, and law, epitomize for Irigaray the reign of sexual indifference, the fraternal order of equal brothers/citizens that is inattentive to the self-division of nature, its immanent sexual differentiation. Irigaray's writings implicate Freud in this culture of sexual indifference, his work a symptom of masculine metaphysics and its dream of self-identity and self-mastery. I will discuss Irigaray's understanding of sexual indifference further below, after first describing and elucidating her style of writing.