Ecriture Feminine: Helene Cixous

     

     In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976) Helene Cixous introduces a new ways of thinking and writing about women and literature.  It is called Ecriture feminine (feminine writing). A feminine text is designed to smash and shatter all the frame work of institutions created by the male authority.

     Feminine writing acknowledges its rootedness in the body. She urges the women saying, “Write yourself, your body must be heard”. Since it is the female body, it has been repressed historically by male theology, philosophy and social system. Theology openly repressed the body advocating the negation of body and desires and in particular the female body, which is regarded as a source of temptation and often as unclean. Writing with the body implies a return of the repressed. It expresses the individuality of the self. This new writing expressing the new woman will resist the myths and language introduced by men

     This new insurgent writing will cause a break in the history of woman at two levels

• It will affect a return of woman to her body, whereby she can realize ‘decensored’ relation to her sexuality
• When she seizes the occasion to speak, this will mark her “shattering entry into history”. It will confirm a place for her other than that is reserved by the male institution and history