As Butler points out, Luce Irigaray (1985) complicates matters further. Here Irigaray’s reference is de Beauvoir’s claim that a woman “is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (1953, 13). De Beauvoir insists that there is no time in history in which women were not the Other: men are always the One and women are always the Other