Écriture féminine, or feminine writing, is Hélène Cixous’s name for an open-ended practice of writing that makes room for bodily experience and unsettles conventions about who can speak. In The Laugh of the Medusa, Cixous connects it to the exclusion of women from writing and to the forms of language through which desire and the body have been understood.
What makes writing feminine in Cixous’s sense?
Cixous addresses women and asks what can happen when they take up language for themselves. She also says that this practice cannot be defined in advance. A list of stylistic features or a writer’s gender would leave out the work a particular text does. The question is how writing can give expression to experiences that familiar genres or habits of speech tend to put aside.
An example of what a shift in voice can do
Imagine a story told about a woman waiting quietly at a table. The description may make waiting seem like the most important thing about her. Give her a voice and the scene can change. She may speak in fragments that bring together the noise of the room, a remembered argument and what she plans to do next. The change in form makes new things perceptible. It also changes the relation between the person described and the reader.
Why it matters to Cixous’s criticism
The arrangement of a sentence or a story can carry a hierarchy, including who gets to act and who is seen from outside. Cixous looks for ways to disturb those arrangements. Read Cixous on Binary Oppositions for their wider structure and Syntax as Power for a comparison with Butler. For a close reading of the example that gives the essay its title, see Why Does Medusa Laugh?.
Further reading · Cixous on Love and Eroticism · Cixous and Derrida · The Laugh of the Medusa in Signs
