MAJOR WORKS:

The Laugh of the Medusa (1975)

This text, originally written in French as Le Rire de la Meduse in 1975, was translated into English by Keith and Paula Cohen in 1976.^[2] Cixous is issuing her female readers an ultimatum of sorts: either they can read it and choose to stay trapped in their own bodies by a language that does not allow them to express themselves, or they can use their bodies as a way to communicate.

"The Laugh of the Medusa" is an extremely literary essay and well-known as an exhortation to a "feminine mode" of writing; the phrases "white ink" and "écriture féminine" are often cited, referring to this desired new way of writing. It is a strident critique of logocentrism and phallogocentrism, having much in common with Jacques Derrida's earlier thought. The essay also calls for an acknowledgment of universal bisexuality or polymorphous perversity, a precursor of queer theory's later emphases, and swiftly rejects many kinds of essentialism which were still common in Anglo-American feminism at the time. The essay also exemplifies Cixous's style of writing in that it is richly intertextual, making a wide range of literary allusions. In homage to French theorists of the feminine, Laughing with Medusa was published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

Sorties (1975)

The text is based on oppositions, of the type Superior/Inferior:

Activity/Pasivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
Day/Night

Father/Mother
Head/Heart
Intelligible/Sensitive
Logos/Pathos

Form, convex,step, advance,seed, progress.
Matter, concave, ground - which supports the step, receptacle.

Man
Woman.

“Hélène Cixous” , from Wikipedia, 6.11.08, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Cixous

Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Sonia Macián Gil
somagil@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press