Ecriture Feminine

Ecriture feminine, literally womens room writing,1more closely, the writing of the pistillate person body and fe potent disparity in diction and text,2is a strain ofwomens liberationist literary theory that originated in Francein the early 1970s and included foundational theorists much(prenominal) asHelene Cixous,Monique Wittig,Luce Irigaray,3Chantal Chawaf,45andJulia Kristeva,67and as well other writers similar psychoanalytical theoristBracha Ettinger,89who joined this field in the early 1990s. 10Generally, French feminists tended to focus their attention on language, analyzing the ways in which meaning is produced.They concluded that language as we comm plainly th sign of it is a decidedly male realm, which therefore only represents a world from the male point of judgment. 11 Nonetheless, the French womens dissemblement developed in much the analogous way as the feminist movements elsewhere in Europe or in the United States French women participated in consciousness-raisin g groups demonstrated in the streets on the8th of March fought hard for womens right to choose whether to have children raised(a) the issue of violence against women and struggled to change public opinion on issues c formerlyrning women and womens rights.The accompaniment that the very first meeting of a handful of would-be feminist activists in 1970 only managed to launch an acrimonious theoretical debate, would seem to lucre the situation as typically French in its apparent insistence on the primacy of theory over politics. 12 Helene Cixousfirst coinedecriture femininein her essay, The prank of the medusan (1975), where she asserts Woman must write her self must write active women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies because their sexual pleasure has been repressed and denied expression.Inspired by Cixous essay, a late book titledLaughing with Medusa(2006) analyzes the collective work of Julia Kristeva, Luce Iri garay, Bracha Ettinger and Helene Cixous. 13These writers are as a whole referred to by Anglophones as the French feminists, though Mary Klages, ally Professor in the English Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has pointed come out of the closet that poststructuralist theoretical feminists would be a more accurate term. 14Madeleine Gagnon is a more recent proponent.And since the aforementioned 1975 when Cixous also founded womens studies at Vincennes, she has been as a spokeswoman for the group Psychanalyse et politique and a prolific writer of texts for their publishing house, des femmes. And when asked of her suffer writing she says, Je suis la ou ca parle (I am there where it/id/the womanly unconscious speaks. )15 American feminist critic and writerElaine Showalterdefines this movement as the inscription of the feminine body and female difference in language and text. 16Ecriture feminine places experience before language, and privileges non-linear, cyclical w riting that evades the discourse that regulates thephallocentricsystem. 17Because language is not a neutral medium, the parameter can be do that it functions as an instrument of patriarchal expression. Peter Barry writes that the female writer is seen as suffering the handicap of having to use a medium (prose writing) which is essentially a male instrument fashioned for male purposes. 18Ecriture feminine thus exists as an antithesis of mannish writing, or as a means of escape for women,although the phallogocentric argument itself has been criticised by W. A. Borody as misrepresenting the history of philosophies of indeterminateness in Western culture. Borody claims that the saturnine and whiteview that the masculine=determinateness and the feminine=indeterminateness contains a degree of cultural and historical validity, simply not when it is deployed to self-replicate a correspondent form of gender-othering it originally sought to overcome. 19In the words of Rosemarie Tong, Cix ous challenged women to write themselves out of the world men constructed for women. She urged women to put themselves-the unthinkable/unthought-into words. 20 Almost everything is yet to be written by women closely femininity about(predicate) their sexual practice, that is, its infinite and supple complexity about their eroticization, sudden turn-ons of a certain minuscule-immense area of their bodies not about destiny, but about the adventure of such and such a drive, about trips, crossings, trudges, abrupt and gradual awakenings, discoveries of a zone at once timorous and soon to be forthright. 14 With regard to phallocentric writing, Tong explains that male sexual practice, which centers on what Cixous called the good-looking dick, is ultimately boring in its pointedness and singularity. Like male sexuality, masculine writing, which Cixous usually termed phallogocentric writing, is also ultimately boring and furthermore, that stamped with the official cast of kind approv al, masculine writing is too weighted down to move or change. 20 Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you not man not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which the publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs notyourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses dont like the true texts of women- female-sexed texts. That kind scares them. 21 For Cixous, ecriture feminine is not only a scuttle for female writers rather, she believes it can be (and has been) employed by male authors such asJames Joyce.Some have found this idea embarrassing to reconcile with Cixous definition of ecriture feminine (often termed white ink) because of the galore(postnominal) references she makes to the female body (There is always in her at least a little of that good mothers milk. She writes in white ink22) when characterizing the essence of ecriture feminine and explaining its origin . This notion raises problems for some theorists Ecriture feminine, then, is by its nature transgressive, rule-transcending, intoxicated, but it is clear that the notion as put forward by Cixous raises many problems.The realm of the body, for instance, is seen as somehow immune to social and gender contour and able to issue forth a pure essence of the feminine. such(prenominal) essentialism is difficult to square with feminism which emphasizes femininity as a social construction23 For Luce Irigaray, womens sexual pleasurejouissancecannot be expressed by the dominant, ordered, logical, masculine language because according to Kristeva, feminine language is derived from the pre-oedipal period of fusion in the midst of mother and child.Associated with the maternal, feminine language is not only a terror to culture, which is patriarchal, but also a medium through which women may be creative in new ways. Irigaray expressed this connection between womens sexuality and womens language th rough the following analogy womensjouissanceis more multiple than mens unitary, phallic pleasure because24 woman has sex organs just about everywhere feminine language is more diffusive than its masculine counterpart. That is doubtlessly the reason her language goes off in all directions and e is unavailing to discern the coherence. 25 Irigaray and Cixous also go on to emphasize that women, historically moderate to being sexual objects for men (virgins or prostitutes, wives or mothers), have been prevented from expressing their sexuality in itself or for themselves. If they can do this, and if they can speak about it in the new languages it calls for, they will establish a point of view (a site of difference) from which phallogocentric concepts and controls can be seen through and taken apart, not only in theory, but also in practice. 26 - editNotes 1. Baldick, Chris. Oxford Concise Dictionary of literary Terms. OUP, 1990. 65. 2. Showalter, Elaine. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 2, Writing and Sexual Difference, (Winter, 1981), pp. 179-205. Published by The University of dough Press. http//www. jstor. org/ electrostatic/1343159 3. Irigaray, Luce,Speculum of the Other Woman, Cornell University Press, 1985 4. Cesbron, Georges, Ecritures au feminin. Propositions de lecture pour quatre livres de femmes in Degre Second, juillet 1980 95-119 5. Mistacco, Vicki, Chantal Chawaf, in Les femmes et la tradition litteraire Anthologie du Moyen Age a nos jours Seconde partie XIXe-XXIe siecles, Yale Press, 2006, 327-343 6. Kristeva, JuliaRevolution in poetical Language, Columbia University Press, 1984 7. Griselda Pollock, To Inscribe in the Feminine A Kristevan Impossibility? Or Femininity, Melancholy and Sublimation. Parallax, n. 8, Vol. 4(3), 1998. 81-117. 8. Ettinger, Bracha,Matrix . Halal(a) Lapsus. Notes on Painting, 1985-1992. MOMA, Oxford, 1993. (ISBN 0-905836-81-2). Reprinted inArtworking 1985-1999. Edited by Piet Coessens. Ghent-Amsterdam Ludion / capital of Be lgium Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000. (ISBN 90-5544-283-6) 9. Ettinger, Bracha,The Matrixial Borderspace(essays 1994-1999), Minnesota University Press, 2006 10. Pollock, Griselda, Does Art Think? , inArt and positionBlackwell, 2003 11. Murfin, Ross C. http//www. ux1. eiu. edu/rlbeebe/what_is_feminist_criticism. pdf 12. Moi, Toril, ed. French Feminist Thought. Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1987. (ISBN 0-631-14972-4) 13. Zajko, Vanda and Leonard, Miriam,Laughing with Medusa. Oxford University Press, 2006 14. abKlages, Mary. Helene Cixous The Laugh of the Medusa. 15. Jones, Ann Rosalind. Feminist Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), pp. 247-263. Published by Feminist Studies, Inc. http//www. jstor. org/stable/3177523 16. Showalter, Elaine. Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness. The New Feminist Criticism essays on women, literature, and theory. Elaine Showalter, ed. London Virago, 1986. 249. 17. Cixous, Helene. The Laugh of the Medusa. New French Feminisms.Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivro n, eds. New York Schocken, 1981. 253. 18. Barry, Peter. start surmisal An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. New York Manchester UP, 2002. 126 19. Wayne A. Borody (1998) pp. 3, 5 count on the Phallogocentric Argument with Respect to the Classical Greek Philosophical Tradition Nebula A Netzine of the Arts and Science, Vol. 13 (pp. 1-27) (http//kenstange. com/nebula/feat013/feat013. html) . 20. abTong, Rosemarie Putnam. Feminist Thought A More Comprehensive Introduction. New York Westview P, 2008. 276. 1. Helene Cixous, Summer 1976. 22. Klages, Mary. Helene Cixous The Laugh of the Medusa. 23. Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. New York Manchester UP, 2002. 128. 24. Murfin, Ross C. http//www. ux1. eiu. edu/rlbeebe/what_is_feminist_criticism. pdf 25. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex. 26. Jones, Ann Rosalind. Feminist Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), pp. 247-263. Published by Feminist Studies, Inc. http//www. jstor. org/stable/3177 523. - editExternal links