Écriture Féminine
“Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing…Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement.” (Cixous) So says Helene Cixous in her seminal essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” This is, essentially, the basis of Helene Cixous’s notion of “Écriture Féminine.” The basis behind this notion of Écriture Féminine stems from the fact that, at the particular point in time in which Helene Cixous was composing this text (and, to an extent, this holds true in present times) the field of authorship was, predominantly, dominated by, as are the majority of things in our society, by males. Cixous referred to this as “phallogocentric writing.” (Cixous) Simply put, male writing is just that, masculine writing. Male writers view their surroundings in a very stereotypical masculine fashion. Only one point of view has been viewed, and this greatly infuriates Cixous. Helene Cixous postulates in the text that Écriture Féminine will be a method that the woman author will utilize to
“realize the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal; it will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty (guilty of everything, guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being “too hot”; for not being both at once; for being too motherly and not enough; for having children and for not having any; for nursing and for not nursing…)…A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman.” (Cixous)
What Cixous is
“realize the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal; it will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty (guilty of everything, guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being “too hot”; for not being both at once; for being too motherly and not enough; for having children and for not having any; for nursing and for not nursing…)…A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman.” (Cixous)
What Cixous is