Helene Cixous, born in 1937, is a French feminist. She, along with Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and various other feminists, are part of what is called "French Feminism," not of their fact of being born in France, but by them being sharing the ideas of feminism propagated by feminists in France in the 1960s, who have been highly influenced by the works of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and many others. Theories of post-structuralism and psychoanalysis highly influenced them all. These French feminists like Cixous both used and critiqued the ideas of such theories to question and challenge the male hegemony.
The ideas of Derrida were used to critique the notion of binaries and the very nature of language, meaning, and the way language plays a heavy role in the subordination of women; a majority of the concepts and ideas are prejudiced against women and are socially and culturally constructed by male hegemony to keep women under a perpetual state of subordination.
All these French feminists put great emphasis on women's physiology and how this can help and guide women's writing so that it can set itself free from the constraints of patriarchal prejudices. Cixous seminal work was titled The Laugh of Medusa and Sorties, published in 1975. Cixous coins the concept of écriture feminine, translated as feminine writing in English. In this work, The Laugh of Medusa, Cixous uses psychoanalysis, inspired by the work of Lacan, as mentioned above, to interpret Greek mythology in a manner that challenges patriarchal hegemony. This work is written in the form of poetry. Cixous intend to break the structural norms of logic and argumentation set by patriarchy and instead prefers a poetic medium that is more imaginative and isn't bound by the limits of prosaic logic. In this, we witness the rebels of Cixous against the boundaries set on women by patriarchy.
Through this work, Cixous urges women to write extensively, as this platform can change history and oppose the male hegemony that has suppressed them and kept them away from such art. Cixous want women to write uniquely, using a pro-female language that celebrates womanhood, their body and sexuality, which have been repressed over the centuries. Cixous uses the Greek myth of the monster Medusa, who is depicted as a fierce, ugly woman, full of rage and has snakes instead of hairs on her head, to argue that patriarchal man has distorted this narrative of Medusa to depict a woman who has desires as dangerous and ugly, contrary to the beautiful, loyal and virgin princess that they adore.
Cixous critiques this very notion where women are either portrayed as monsters like Medusa or as an "unexplored abyss", an idea proposed by Freud where he insinuates women as beings who are negative of what men stand for. They are shown as lacking beings (lacking penis), and the mystery of their nature can't be explored or understood.
This is what Cixous wants women to be: to be rebellious, which defies all boundaries and structures that patriarchy wants to restrain women from. Cixous uses the metaphor of the laugh of Medusa as a tool to reject the very idea of truth, binaries that are deeply ingrained in Western patriarchal thoughts as she says, "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".
As explained above, this laugh is the laugh of a rebellious woman against male tyranny in any form whatsoever. For Cixous, the goal of this feminine writing, which she wants women to write with full vigour and freedom, is to "smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the 'truth' and that too in a way as manifested in the demystified version of Medusa with laughter.
No comments:
Post a Comment