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@helene-cixous
“You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.”
Hélène Cixous
écriture feminine: aims to reflect women’s sexuality and awareness of their own bodies
the laugh of the medusa
Cixous’ work, The Laugh of the Medusa, looks at the interaction and impact of gender on language. Through her rhetoric, she seeks to create a new language, one that is distinctly feminine and powerful, though it is important to note that not just biological women can write with the feminine language. This language is referred to as écriture feminine. The work is written fluidly, moving from idea to idea in a loose structure. This is meant to express and mimic how women experience erotic sexuality. Her work also reflects feminist theory of the time, which sought to redefine fixed symbolic structures and worked alongside the Post-Structuralist movement.
One of Cixous’ main points regards binary language. This type of language brings division between men and women by defining women only by what they lack - not A vs. B, but rather A vs. not-A. The man acts as the dominate while the woman acts as the recessive.
She uses the metaphor of the Dark Continent of Africa to express how women are unexplored and undeveloped, currently only acting as something for men to exploit while glorifying themselves. Women have been trained to be servile and domestic to men from a young age, so they do not know any differently.
Man is creator of this construct, especially the language construct, because our societies and cultures are phallocentric. The domains of this phallocentric control are:
Culture - women are inferior
Social/political - no “female sexed texts”
Psychology - emotionally weak
Women’s inability to express their private desires without restraint leads to guilt and results in anti-narcissism and self-hate. The only current notions of women who freely express themselves are outcasts of phallocentric narrative. These outcasts include witches, as they are not afraid to speak their mind, and little girls, who are viewed as ill-mannered because they have not yet been taught the phallocentric way of the world.
Women shouldn’t give into their feeling of guilt but adopt the free spirit of laughing. This is where the allusion to Medusa comes in, as Cixous rewrites her narrative by saying how she laughed and was beautiful. They must avoid the influence of male “sirens,” who have been controlling women for centuries with “sound” of their established traditions. These men feared the inner strength of women and used patriarchal dominance to keep them subjugated.
Cixous argues for women to break free from the phallocentric structure by:
Expressing the needs of her body without restraint, giving her freedom to be herself uninhibited
Adopting the anti-logos weapon by putting a stop to writing in the prose, the male-centric expression, and using poetic expression instead
“When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.”
Hélène Cixous
“Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs.”
Hélène Cixous
cixous’ rhetoric
Cixous advocates for the destruction of symbolic language, which is dominated and geared towards men. Women’s language is the opposite of the Lacanian structural ideas, as it is a primal feminine “Voice” that precedes the symbolic. Yet the symbolic with “its separating semantic, grammatical and rhetorical scissions” tries to stifle the Voice, so it must be removed for the Voice to survive (Sharon-Zisser).
Cixous perceives rhetoric as an “economy of…signs–of signifiers–and of subjectivity” and as a “discourse of man” that women have always functioned ‘within’ (Newly Born Woman, The Laugh of the Medusa). And “woman” was a signifier that “always referred back to the opposite signifier,” otherwise known as man (The Laugh of the Medusa). “Nearly the entire history of writing,” she states, “has been one with [this] phallocentric tradition” of a masculinist rhetoric (Newly Born Woman). The entire Western discourse on rhetoric is phallocentric in her view, causing women to be “excluded from its practice” and “uninscribed in its forms” (Sharon-Zisser).
The only way for women to combat this symbolic phallocentric language is for them to “spring forth from that ‘within’” (The Laugh of the Medusa) and utilize her Voice, her own primordial feminine language. But women must go all the way, not simply stopping at subversive, for “there is no room for her if she’s not a he” (The Laugh of the Medusa). All previous institutions and structures must be destroyed, framework shattered, law blown up as “she blazes her trail in the symbolic” (The Laugh of the Medusa).
“We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.”
Hélène Cixous
glossary
Phallocentrism: ideology that the male genitalia, the phallus, is the core of the social world; reasoning behind male privilege and the patriarchy
Binary opposition: language system in which two concepts are set opposite to each other, which Structuralists view as the structure for human thought (example: on and off); man (dominate) versus woman (woman)
Anti-logos: opposite of reason and judgement; stop writing in male-centric expression of prose (logos) and adopt poetic expression (anti-logos)
Anti-narcissism: female internalization of the male gaze that they can never live up to rather than developing an individual self; self-hatred of women for not having the power and position of men
Medusa: symbol of female genitalia with her iconic open mouth and wild snake hair, which is viewed as negative and disgusting and turns men to stone (referring to male erection); Cixous transforms and reclaims by portraying her as laughing and fills her mouth with beautiful language
Photographs by Lalla Essaydi: L’Écriture Féminine / Le Corps Féminin
"And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it."
Hélène Cixous
influences
- Sigmund Freud:
Psychoanalyst | Desires of men given more importance than women | Phallic symbols represent power driven authority of man while women were deprived of power symbols
- Jacques Lacan:
Structuralist | Phallic structures are symbolic realism situated in language, interpreted through the principle of binary opposition | Women lack some abilities in regard to language because they lack a penis
+ Jacques Derrida:
Poststructuralist | Fellow Jew from Algeria so both experienced in not belonging | Used logocentrism and deconstruction in his demonstration of the social structure of speech, which was central to Cixous’ argument