Life & Background
Cixous was born in Oran, French Algeria in 1937 to a Sephardic Jewish father and an Ashkenazi German-Jewish mother who had fled Nazi Germany; her father died when she was eleven, and the family lost French citizenship under Vichy law. She has written that being Jewish, female, and Algerian in a French colony taught her displacement before she could name it. She took a doctorate on Joyce, and in 1968 helped found the experimental University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, where she established Europe's first centre for women's studies. She has published more than seventy books — fiction, theory, and plays, several for Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil — and has worked closely with Derrida, a fellow Algerian Jew, over several decades.
The Laugh of the Medusa
The essay is an exhortation rather than an argument: woman must write herself, must put herself into the text, into the world, and into history, by her own movement. Cixous claims that women have been driven from writing as violently as from their bodies, taught to hate themselves and to police their own speech. Against the Freudian account of woman as lack and castration, she offers the Medusa reimagined — not deadly but beautiful, and laughing. She calls for a writing that comes from the body, that overflows, that does not organise itself around a single point, and she names Colette, Duras, and Genet as rare instances of it in French. The essay ends by insisting that this writing cannot be theorised or enclosed, only practised.
Écriture féminine describes a mode of writing, not the biological sex of the writer — Cixous includes male writers in her examples, which is the most common misunderstanding of the term. Her target is the chain of hierarchical binaries she sets out in The Newly Born Woman: activity/passivity, sun/moon, culture/nature, head/heart, with man always on the privileged side and woman associated with the second term or with nothing. The style enacts the argument, refusing linear exposition, which is why the essay is often taught as an object rather than summarised. She belongs with Irigaray and Kristeva in what anglophone criticism calls French feminism, though the grouping flattens real differences between them.
Key Concepts
Why Cixous Matters
Cixous supplies the most quoted formulation of a feminist poetics of writing, and The Laugh of the Medusa is among the most anthologised essays in gender studies. She is the standard reference for écriture féminine, for the critique of phallogocentrism, and for the French feminist trio examined alongside Anglo-American gynocriticism — the Showalter–Cixous contrast is a recurring examination question, since one proposes a tradition of women's writing to be studied and the other a mode of writing to be practised.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Laugh of the Medusa1975
- The Newly Born Woman (with Catherine Clément)1975
- Coming to Writing1977
- The Book of Promethea1983
- Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing1993