“Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth” – Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
Helene Cixous’s “Le Rire de la Meduse” was published in 1975. Translated as “The Laugh of the Medusa”, this famous poststructuralist French feminist text seeks to bring women to writing through a reconnection to their bodies, creating the potentiality for large scale societal change. Cixous writes of women “She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history” (880). A poetic and philosophical text, its politics should not be overlooked. Not only poststructuralist feminist theory, philosophy or prose, it is also a strategic and instructive political activism. Barbara A. Biesecker argues that “The Laugh of the Medusa” “can be read as more than an elaborate philosopheme, indeed as rhetoric, as a treatise that seeks to provide women with the means by which they may, through language, actively and strategically intervene in the public sphere” (89). Cixous suggests that women write as women and that in so doing the world will change.
For Cixous and other poststructuralist thinkers language plays an active role in creating ‘reality’ so it follows that using language differently can produce different ‘realities’. As a poststructuralist feminist text “The Laugh of the Medusa” takes part in what Nalini Persam calls “the poststructuralist project … a complete dismantling of the present (symbolic) order of things” (286). Cixous sees language itself as an active creator of women’s oppression and invites women to writing, reimagining masculine languages into what she calls an “ecriture feminine”: a feminine mode of writing. Cixous insists that there is a feminine way of writing which can be accessed through a rediscovery of the lived female body and that can lead to a break down of pervasive phallogocentrism and thus lead to new ways of thinking and living. Because Cixous locates the female body as an access point for feminine writing she has been interpreted as and criticized for relying on essentialism. Barbara A. Biesecker argues, however, that Cixous’s use of the female body is a rhetorical strategy rather than a reliance on essentialism. “The Laugh of the Medusa” demonstrates in style what it argues for in content and is a radical revaluation of alternatives to linear, hierarchical, rational, phallocentric thinking.
Language, written and oral, historical and literary, has been defined, used and valued on phallocentric terms. Cixous writes that “Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason … it has been one with the phallocentric tradition” (879). Because language has not been for women and because it has in fact been used to oppress women, Cixous argues that women must use language differently. Women do not automatically adopt the feminine mode of writing according to Cixous rather women often reproduce phallogocentrism in their writing. Masculine writing (re)produces polarizations and hierarchy, linearity and logic whereas feminine writing is continuous and overflowing with the potential of producing yet unseen ways of thinking. Susan Sellers describes the feminine mode of writing as “beginning with the re-discovery of the body and rooted in the celebration of difference” (446). Cixous points out that writing has been and continues to be “typically masculine [and] a locus where the repression of women [is] perpetuated over and over” (879). The masculine mode of writing has powerfully shaped reality and likewise the feminine mode of writing has the potential to do so because writing is, according to Cixous, “the very possibility of change” (879). Writing actively shapes reality. The feminine mode of writing can shape reality in new ways.
The task of writing in the feminine mode can be accomplished through a reconnection to the lived experience of the female body. Breaking the phallogocentric mind/body dualism that privileges and locates creativity, intellect and subjectivity in the mind, Cixous suggests that the “ecriture feminine” can be unleashed only through the body. To write in the feminine mode “Women must write through their bodies, they must invent impregnable language” (886). When reconnected to her body, Cixous writes that women experience it as a “body without end, without appendage, without ‘principal parts’” (889). A woman can experience herself as “capable of losing a part of herself without losing her integrity” (888). This continuity of the female bodily experience, that perceives itself as whole and continuous, that does not create division within the self or experience boundary between the self and others, contrasts starkly with the masculine bodily experience that “gravitates around the penis, engendering that centralized body … under the dictatorship of its parts” (889). The phallic economy of division and hierarchy is definitive of the masculine mode of writing. The feminine mode, accessible through the material experience of the female body, is fluid and continuous without clear boundaries.
The feminine mode of writing, exemplified in the style of “The Laugh of the Medusa”, is different from the masculine one we are used to. Sellers writes that the feminine mode of writing “involves a radical transformation of literary genre. Refusing arbitrary order, no beginnings or ends to narratives, no attempt to imprison time in a linear structure, no false division of parts” (446). Narrative and sentence structure, grammar and punctuation and words themselves do not need to submit to the rules and logic of phallogocentrism and the masculine mode of writing. In developing a feminine mode of writing, an “ecriture feminine” women need not be bound by what Cixous describes as “the language of men and their grammar” (887). Instead of a structured, linear format, the feminine mode of writing is free to take on various forms and to use language creatively and continuously. Like the female body’s cyclical and overflowing capacities the feminine mode of writing is neither chronological nor contained. Cixous writes of women “We’re stormy, and that which is ours breaks loose from us without fearing any debilitation. Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end” (878). Women are continuous and boundaryless, multiple with multiple mouths, menstruating and overflowing, always extending. It is this that Cixous wants women to bring to writing and it is this that she herself does.
Cixous refuses to define the feminine mode of writing, insisting “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded – which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist” (883). The fluidity and boundarylessness of feminine writing is such that it cannot be enclosed within a static definition. Cixous cannot say exactly what it is. She can and does however show us what it can be, through her own use of the feminine mode of writing. Her writing overflows with allusions and metaphors. She uses form creatively. She plays on words and their double meanings, such as the verb voler which means both ‘steal’ and ‘fly’. She avoids the hierarchical logic of masculine writing by inviting all women into writing and speaking to them intimately, as equals. Biesecker writes that “The Laugh of the Medusa” is “enunciated in an idiom thoroughly commensurate with its pragmatic aim” (90). By speaking to women in a way that is inclusive and inviting, she succeeds in encouraging women to write. Her own language is instrumental. It is “neither from the position of the detached third person nor to a distant or formal audience; it is a personal “I” that writes with and to a familiar you” (90). This intimate address is inappropriate under the rules of phallogocentrism. It is an appropriate possible manifestation of the feminine mode of writing.
Although Cixous does not equate being female with an automatic expression of the feminine mode of writing she does see the female body as a privileged point of access. Her references to female bodily processes like menstruation, lactation and pregnancy, her representation of the female body as boundaryless and continuous and her descriptions of women as endlessly giving, always spilling over into another, can be interpreted as essentialist. She disrupts the phallocentric mind/body dualism by valuing the body as a source of knowledge, yet by over-privileging the female body as a source of female knowledge she risks further entrenching the associations between women and body, women and nature, women and the irrational. By over-emphasizing the importance of women’s shared bodily experiences she risks overlooking important differences between women and the affects of race, class, ability and sexual orientation. However, Cixous herself points out “there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions… Women’s imaginary is inexhaustible” (876). Her acknowledgement of difference is important but her analysis might have been richer if consideration of multiple subject positions was given throughout the text.
Biesecker argues that Cixous’s focus on women’s shared bodily experiences should not be read as simple essentialism. Rather, she sees it as a rhetorical device. She points out that Cixous, following Derrida, sees that “by giving up the deadly dream of the unfettered origin or absolute clean space, one can, as Derrida put it, begin wherever one is” (91). One can never begin if one must start from nowhere. The only way to move to action is to begin from where you are. This insight is important for women, who are systemically assigned to inaction. Biesecker writes “Women have historically been constituted in and by language as body rather than mind, as beings ruled by nature rather than culture” (93). Women are relegated to the ‘body’ half of the mind/body dichotomy posited by phallogocentric thinking. Since that is where women are positioned, that is where they are. The body is where women begin. Thus, Biesecker asks us “Now in light of Cixous’s perspective on beginnings, might we not decipher her advice that women turn to their bodies … in order to find their voices as a situated rhetorical strategy and not, as most readers would have it, as a glorification or essentialization of the female body per se?” (93). Biesecker reminds us that Cixous writes “The past must no longer make the future” (94). Beginning in the body does not mean the body is the end.
Whether or not Cixous’s use of the female body works as a rhetorical strategy or further entrenches essentialist ideas is disagreed upon. However, throughout the text “The Laugh of the Medusa” often uses the category of “woman” without any further intersectional analysis. Certain aspects of the text, in addition, may be alienating to some readers. Cixous’s use of Africa in the text as a metaphor is problematic. She likens a racist and colonial view of Africa as “the Dark Continent” to the feminine mode of writing, describing both as vast and unexplored. In the process of this metaphor she disguises the colonial violence of the invasions and occupations of Africa as a positive ‘exploration’. She writes “[The Dark Continent] is still unexplored only because we’ve been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable” (885). Here exploration and ‘penetration’ of ‘the Dark Continent’ reads as a positive event, not as imperialism. This uncritical use of colonial language obscures the violence of colonialism and thus limits the usefulness of the text. Cixous misses the richness of multiple subject positions also when she writes “A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter” (880). While she means ‘dumb’ and ‘blind’ metaphorically this line turns disabled bodies into passive non-fighters.
Helene Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa”, a poststructuralist French feminist text that calls women to writing through a reconnection with the lived female body anticipates the emergence of a feminine mode of writing. The masculine logocentric mode of writing, focused on polarization and hierarchies, limits possibilities. The new feminine mode of writing will emphasize continuity and wholeness, the merging of boundaries and the opening of possibilities. It will shape the world in new and different ways. Cixous’s access of the feminine mode of writing through the female body can be interpreted as essentialist and limiting or it can be read as a rhetorical strategy that asks women to begin where they have been located, within their bodies. Cixous’s invitation to use language creatively and differently opens up possibilities for expression in writing and thus opens up possibilities for ways of being and knowing in the world.
Works Cited
Biesecker, Barbara A. “Towards a Transactional View of Rhetorical and Feminist Theory: Rereading Helene Cixous’s The Laugh of Medusa.” The Southern Communication Journal. 57.2. (1992): 86-96. Online.
Cixous, Helene. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, translators. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs. 1.4. (1975): 875-893. Online.
Persram, Nalini. “Politicizing the Feminine, Globalizing the Feminist.” Alternatives. 19.1. (1994): 275-313. Online.
Sellers, Susan. “Writing Woman: Helene Cixous’ Political ‘Sexts’.” Women’s Studies Int. Forum. 9.4. (1986): 443-447. Online.
