Why do we keep reading journals in this class, and why have you been assigned an alternative kind of open project for the end of the term?
In keeping with our focus on women writers, we are taking some feminist concerns about language and the academy to heart. That is, we are putting some principles of écriture féminine into practice. The items below address some of the theoretical underpinnings of this kind of work.
"Since 1975, when she founded women's studies at Vincennes,
Hé1ène Cixous has been a spokeswoman for the group Psychanalyse et politique and a
prolific writer of texts for their publishing house, Des Femmes. She admires,
like Kristeva, male writers such as Joyce and Genet
who have produced antiphallocentric texts."11 But she is convinced that women's unconscious
is totally different from men's, and that it is their psychosexual specificity
that will empower women to overthrow masculinist
ideologies and to create new female discourses.... She has produced a series of
analyses of women's suffering under the laws of male sexuality...she celebrates
the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector for what she
sees as a peculiarly female attentiveness to objects, the ability to perceive
and represent them in a nurturing rather than dominating way. She believes that
this empathetic attentiveness, and the literary modes to which it gives rise,
arise from libidinal rather than sociocultural
sources; the "typically feminine gesture, not culturally but libidinally, [is] to produce in order to bring about life,
pleasure, not in order to accumulate."13
...In her manifesto for l'écriture
féminine, "The Laugh of the Medusa"
(1975), her comparisons and lyricism suggest that she admires in women a
sexuality that is remarkably constant and almost mystically superior to the
phallic single-mindedness it transcends:
Though masculine sexuality gravitates around the penis, engendering that
centralized body (in political anatomy) under the dictatorship of its parts,
woman does not bring about the same regionalization
which serves the couple head/genitals and which is inscribed only within
boundaries. Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide.
She goes on immediately, in terms close to Irigaray's,
to link women's diffuse sexuality to women's language-written language, in this
case:
Her writing can only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning
contours.... She lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000
tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death.... Her language does not
contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible.
The passage ends with her invocation of other bodily drives (pulsions in the French) in a continuum with women's
self-expression.
Oral drive, anal drive, vocal drive—all these drives are our
strengths, and among them is the gestation drive—just like the desire to
write: a desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen belly, for
language, for blood.15
...What Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous do in
common, then, is to oppose women's bodily experience (or, in Kristeva's case, women's bodily effect as mothers) to the
phallic-symbolic patterns embedded in Western thought. Although Kristeva does not privilege women as the only possessors of
prephallocentric discourse, Irigaray
and Cixous go further: if women are to discover and
express who they are, to bring to the surface what masculine history has
repressed in them, they must begin with their sexuality. And their sexuality
begins with their bodies, with their genital and libidinal difference from men.
For various reasons, this is a powerful argument.
We have seen versions of it in the radical feminism of the United
States, too. In the French context, it
offers an island of hope in the void left by the deconstruction of humanism,
which has been revealed as an ideologically suspect invention by men. If men
are responsible for the reigning binary system of meaning—identity/other,
man/nature, reason/chaos, man/woman—women, relegated to the negative and
passive pole of this hierarchy, are not implicated in the creation of its
myths. (Certainly, they are no longer impressed by them!) And the immediacy
with which the body, the id, jouissance, are
supposedly experienced promises a clarity of perception and a vitality that can
bring down mountains of phallocentric delusion.
Finally, to the extent that the female body is seen as a direct source of
female writing, a powerful alternative discourse seems possible: to write from
the body is to re-create the world.
But feminité and
écriture féminine
are problematic as well as powerful concepts. They have been criticized as
idealist and essentialist, bound up in the very system they claim to undermine;
they have been attacked as theoretically fuzzy and as fatal to constructive
political action.16 I think all these
objections are worth making..." (Jones article)