When Hélène Cixous calls on women to write themselves, who can recognize themselves in the invitation? The question is especially pressing in The Laugh of the Medusa, an essay that speaks to women as a group while insisting on the diversity of their experiences. Judith Butler’s account of feminist representation offers a way to read that tension.
What the charge of essentialism asks
An essentialist account treats a shared identity as if it followed from an underlying nature. Some images in Cixous can be read in that way, especially when the body or the maternal seems to supply a common ground for writing. Other passages resist that reading. Cixous distinguishes biological and cultural questions, refuses the idea of a uniform female sexuality and leaves écriture féminine open to forms she cannot define in advance.
Butler and the limits of representation
In the first chapter of Gender Trouble, Butler asks how feminist politics makes use of the category women. Representation can bring a group into view. It can also set boundaries around who counts as a recognizable member of that group. The political question includes what those boundaries do and who is left outside them.
Reading the invitation again
Cixous wants an address capable of reaching people excluded from writing. Butler helps us ask whether the address can be revised by the people who receive it. A reading can attend to the collective appeal and to the places where it strains against the diversity it is meant to welcome. That tension belongs to what makes the essay worth returning to.
Further reading · Hélène Cixous: ideas and works · Syntax as Power: Butler and Cixous · Read the essay in Signs
