Women's writing and sexuality must be freed: On the birthday of French feminist author Helene Cixous, here's a look at how her best-known essay still resonates today
Deutsche Welle Published 05.06.23,
A depiction of the Medusa myth by Caravaggio, 1571-1610Deutsche Welle
Helene Cixous' call is clear: "Woman must write her self."
Even if some of the post-structuralist and theoretical references in "The Laugh of the Medusa" can feel challenging for unversed readers, the essay by the French feminist author is filled with striking, empowering quotes.
It remains essential reading, especially for any young woman hoping to become an author: "Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself."
A pioneer of feminist studies in Europe
Born on June 5, 1937, in French Algeria to Jewish parents, Cixous became known for her experimental writing style, covering many genres: theater, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.
In 1974, Cixous established Europe's first center for women's studies at the University of Paris VIII, a public and experimental university which she also co-founded as a direct response to the French student riots of May 1968.
The essayist, novelist and playwright has published over 70 works and is seen as a strong contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Her most influential article remains "The Laugh of the Medusa," which was originally published in French under the title "Le Rire de la Meduse" in 1975, and was translated into English by Paula Cohen and Keith Cohen in 1976.
On masturbation and writing
Even though the literary landscape has considerably evolved since the 1970s, with more women authors being published and gaining recognition in recent years, "The Laugh of the Medusa" is an important reminder that over millennia, our Western cultural heritage has been defined through the male perspective.
Cixous argues that woman's abasement has been defined by how we have been "colonized" by "phallogocentric" thinking. The author builds on ideas developed by fellow Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). He was the one who coined the term "phallogocentrism," which refers to the focus given to the masculine point of view through language.
While she rejects our culture's imposed patriarchal narratives, Cixous' essay is equally filled with juicy phallic references, such as: "The act of writing is equivalent to masculine masturbation (and so the woman who writes cuts herself out a paper penis)."
For the feminist author, there is a direct connection between freeing woman's writing and the liberation of their personal sexuality, as both woman's writing and masturbation were too long associated with shame; they could only be done in secret, and accompanied by a feeling of guilt.
Revisiting the myth of the Medusa
The essay refers to the Greek myth of Medusa, a monster with venomous snakes for hair, whose gaze turned men to stone.
For Cixous, men's narrative portrayals of Medusa — a symbol of seduction and power — turned her into a symbol of the threat of castration. Medusa represented their fear of female desire.
"My text was an update of Greek mythology. There is no better example to describe the position of women and the murderous battle men take up against women. Medusa was one of three Gorgons [powerful, winged daemons], the daughters of Phorkys and Keto. She was the only mortal among them. Men were afraid of her. When they looked at her, they turned to stone," Cixous told DW in December 2022, referring to her famous essay.
"But why did she have such great power over men? Because she saw the men. The latter did not have the time to see her," she added.
Medusa and freeing women's hair in Iran
"Men do not want to see women and they put veils over them so that they become invisible, like phantoms. It is terrible to what extent women have been veiled, even in daily life," Cixous said in the DW interview focusing on women's protests in Iran. "Yet women are not objects, not veiled dolls. They are radiant. They are beautiful. My Medusa has traveled around the world. Right now she is obviously in Iran."
The feminist author was initially hesitant to speak on behalf of women fighting for their rights in Iran:
"Of course, I ask myself whether I can legitimately comment on this. After all, I'm not in Iran and I'm not risking my life like the people there. But she was encouraged to do so by fellow feminists: "My Iranian friends told me, why don't you do something? Speak! If you speak, the local people will hear. It is important for me to say, I heard you."
Meanwhile, Medusa has been widely adopted by feminists and the #MeToo movement as a symbol of rage and the protector of women's secrets.
Cixous has also revisited her own text in a 2010 republication of the French original with a new foreword, exploring the idea of Medusa as a queer body, which is another reason why the essay remains widely quoted to this day.
"You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her," writes Cixous. "And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing."
Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of Medusa"
1971
...I write this as a woman, towards women. When I say 'woman,' I'm speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history. But first it must be said that in spite of the enormity of the repression that has kept them in the the "dark" --that dark which people have been trying to make them accept as their attribute-- there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can't talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes --any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.
I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all their own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of knowledge, on the basis of systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resononant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty will no longer be forbidden.
I wished that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst --burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What' the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a...divine composure), hasn't actually accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.
And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great --that is for 'great men'; and it's 'silly'. Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty --so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time....
The Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable. It is still unexplored only because we've been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable. And because they want to make us believe that what interests us is the white continent, with its monuments to Lack. And we believed. They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss. That would be enough to see half the world laughing, except that it's still going on. For the phallogocentric sublation is with us, and it's militant, regenerating the old patterns, anchored in the dogma of castration. They haven't changed a thing: they've theorized their desire for reality! Let the priests tremble, we're going to show they our sexts!
Too bad for them, if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren't men, or that the mother doesn't have one. But isn't this fear convenient for them? Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and laughing....
We've been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty; we've been made victims of the old fool's game: each one will love the other sex. I'll give you your body and you'll give me mine. But who are the men who give women the body that women blindly yield to them? Why so few texts? Because so few women have as yet won back their body. Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word 'silence', the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word 'impossible' and writes it as 'the end.'
Such is the syntax of women that, sweeping away syntax, breaking that famous thread (just a tiny little thread, they say) which acts for men as a surrogate umbilical cord, assuring them --otherwise they couldn't come-- that the old lady is always right behind them, wathcing them make phallus, women will go right up to the impossible....
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