Laugh of the

Medusa

Hélène Cixous

1937Oran, Algeria

Doctorate in LiteratureEuropean Graduate School

University of Paris VIII

Center for Women Studies

Poststructuralist Feminist Theory

Sexuality and Writing 70Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Arthur Rimbaud.

Le Rire De Le Meduse

1975

Translated to English by Keith and Paula Cohen

in 1976

The Laugh of the Medusa

“I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into story-by her own movement.”

Lacan’s Symbolic Order

PHALLUS

Language is patriarchal

Phallogocentric =

Phallocentric – centered around the phallus

Logocentric – preference for speech over language

UNREPRESENTED

UNSPEAKABLE

Female Oedipus Complex

Clitoris Vagina

Attraction to Female Bodies

Attraction to Male Bodies

Active (masculine) sexuality

Passive (feminine) sexuality

NORMAL(non-incestuous reproductive heterosexual)

Destroy or deconstruct the phallogocentric system Lacan describes

Project new strategies for a new kind of relation between female bodies and language

Men are closer to phallus while women, who, instead of penises, have ‘nothing’, have ‘absence’.

Before women can write, they have to discover where their sexual pleasure is located.

L’ecriture Feminine

Feminine Writing

Possible only in poetry

Closer to the unconscious

Closer to what has been repressed, which is the female sexuality, the female body.

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.

-- "The Laugh of the Medusa"

2 Levels of L’ecriture Feminine

Women must find their own sexuality and find ways to write about that pleasure.

When women will write about their own bodies the structure of language will change; as women become active subjects, their position in language will shift.

“Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women-female-sexed tests. That kind scares them.”

Not objective or objectifiable

Erase the division between speech and text, order and chaos, between sense and nonsense

Will be an inherently deconstructive language

Will bring users closer to the union and non-separation

White Ink

Convey the idea of a reunion with the maternal body; to a place where there is no lack or separation

Cannot be theorized or enclosed, or understood – which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

It can’t be defined, but it can be ‘conceived’ of by the ‘outlaws’ and those outlaws are women

Literal and metaphoric level

Myth of MedusaMyth of woman as

black hole or abyss

In Freudian terms,

A woman lacks penis (positive, presence) and instead has this scary hole where the penis might disappear and never come back.

…part of the fear of castration, the woman whose hair is writhing with lots of penises. She’s scary not because she has no penis but because she has too many.

Nowhere in these myths is there a depiction of a female of itself, without a reference to the penis!

If women could show men their true sexual pleasures, their real bodies through writing, men would understand that female bodies, female sexuality is not about penises at all!

That’s why women should show their sexts!

NEOLOGISM

Sex + Texts = Sexts

The idea of female sexuality as a new form of writing

Raped

Killed

Beheaded

In the original story, the Medusa was a beautiful woman who held a very positive role. Tragedy fell upon her when she was confronted with endless hardships brought upon by male actions. Medusa was a beautiful woman who was raped, killed and beheaded by various gods. However even in the face of tragedy and disgrace, the Medusa was portrayed as meaningful. Following the moment her head was removed, a Pegasus flew out of her body, representing the birth of beauty.

Just as the Medusa was powerless to fight against the repressive actions forced upon her, so too was she powerless against the continual metamorphosing of the myth which resulted in the more popular Medusa myth commonly known today. In this popular version the Medusa is a monster with hair of a thousand snakes. She is under a curse which causes everything she looks at to turn to stone. Cixous explains that this monstrous image of the Medusa exists only because it has been directly determined by the male gaze.

“Men have committed the greatest

crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs. They have made for women an antinarcissism! A narcissism which loves itself only to be loved for what women haven't got! They have constructed the infamous logic of antilove.”

“When the “repressed” of their culture and their society returns ,it’s an explosive, utterly destructive, staggering return, with a force never yet unleashed and equal to the most forbidding of the suppressions. For when the Phallic period comes to an end, women will have been either annihilated or borne up to the highest and most violent incandescence.”

“Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren’t men, or that the mother doesn’t have one? But isn’t this fear convenient for them? Wouldn’t that worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that woman aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were man) for history to change it’s meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”

Comparison between Woolf & Cixous

Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf

Motherhood is a hindrance to writing/creativity

Critiqued the imperialist nature of patriarchal linguistic structures

Intimidated by the social taboos of her day

Helene CixousHelene Cixous

Motherhood is a major catalyst for writing

Actively identifies with the colonized & urges women not to identify themselves in relation to men

Seeks to destroy the prison of sexual impropriety

THANK

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