Écriture féminine

Écriture féminine, literally "gendered women's writing," [Baldick, Chris. "Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms". OUP, 1990. 65.] is a strain of feminist literary theory that originated in France in the 1970s.

Hélène Cixous first uses this term in her essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975), in which she asserts, "Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies." Elaine Showalter defines it as "the inscription of the feminine body and female difference in language and text." [Showalter, Elaine. "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness." "The New Feminist Criticism: essays on women, literature, and theory". Elaine Showalter, ed. London: Virago, 1986. 249.] Écriture féminine places experience before language, and privileges non-linear, cyclical writing that evades "the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system." [Cixous, Hélène. "The Laugh of the Medusa." "New French Feminisms". Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New York: Schocken, 1981. 253.] For Cixous, écriture féminine is not only a possibility for female writers; rather, she believes it can be (and has been) employed by male authors such as James Joyce.

Écriture féminine was especially well developed by French and other European feminists. It is now widely recognized by Anglophone scholars as a sub-category of feminist literary theory. Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray [Irigaray, Luce, "Speculum of the Other Woman", Cornell University Press, 1985] and Julia Kristeva [Kristeva, Julia "Revolution in Poetic Language", Columbia University Press, 1984] , [Griselda Pollock, "To Inscribe in the Feminine: A Kristevan Impossibility? Or Femininity, Melancholy and Sublimation." "Parallax, n. 8", [Vol. 4(3)] , 1998. 81-117.] were foundational theorists of the movement, and also other writers including Bracha Ettinger [Ettinger, Bracha, "Matrix . Halal(a) - Lapsus. Notes on Painting, 1985-1992". MOMA, Oxford, 1993. (ISBN 0-905836-81-2). [Reprinted in: "Artworking 1985-1999". Edited by Piet Coessens. Ghent-Amsterdam: Ludion / Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000. (ISBN 90-5544-283-6)] and psychoanalytical theory [Ettinger, Bracha, "The Matrixial Borderspace" (essays1994-1999), Minnesota University Press, 2006] joined this field in the early 1990s. [Pollock, Griselda, "Does Art Think?", in: "Art and Thought" Blackwell, 2003] The book "Laughing with Medusa" (2006) analyses the work of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. [Zajko, Vanda and Leonard, Miriam, "Laughing with Medusa". Oxford University Press, 2006] Collectively these writers are sometimes referred to by Anglophones as "the French feminists," though Mary Klages has pointed out that "poststructuralist theoretical feminists" would be a more accurate term. [Klages, Mary. " [http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/cixous.html Helene Cixous: 'The Laugh of the Medusa] .'"] Madeleine Gagnon is a more recent proponent.

Notes

External links

* [http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/english/English295/albright/main1.htm "The Laugh of the Medusa" Resource Page]
* [http://webs.wofford.edu/hitchmoughsa/Writing.html Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l'Écriture féminine]
* [http://www.egwald.com/ubcstudent/prose/strategiesdifference.php Strategies of Difference and Opposition] Hélène Cixous' writing strategy of "écriture féminine".