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
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