 New materialism in particular has been influenced by the work of poststructuralist Luce Irigaray, who draws on the imagery of the female body to offer an alternative to masculine models of autonomy. Irigaray plays off the symbol of the vaginal lips to figure a mode of selfhood in which the body is always already two, a self-touching organism that is multiplicitous (Irigaray 1985b and 1993). Through this gesture, Irigaray reclaims the association of the feminine with the body in the face of masculine dreams of separatist autonomy. Through her strategy of “mimesis”, Irigaray utilizes the very stereotypes that have been used against women in order to undermine them: she plays on the traditional conception of woman as the “other”, the mere body, the passive “mirror” of the male subject. She depicts an erotic love of self that affirms difference within oneself and allows the self-differentiating subject to connect with others. She also resists the very idea of identity as presuming a unified, phallocentric model of selfhood (Irigaray 1985b).