Page 128 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FRENCH FEMINISMS

had insisted upon the biological necessity of sexual difference. Hence
the early centrality to its discourse of the analytical distinction between
biological sex on the one hand, and socially produced gender on the
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other. But if the female is to be celebrated positively, as in gynocritics
it must be, then difference becomes much less of a political and
theoretical liability. In the work of Hélène Cixous and in that of Luce
Irigaray, female difference is at once both itself cause for celebration
and also irretrievably biological in origin. Between the male and female
body, and between male and female sexuality, is the source of that
difference which for Cixous explains women’s writing, and for Irigaray
women’s language. If Cixous and Irigaray each experiment, in different
ways, with both biological and linguistic models of difference, then
the best known French feminist application of a psychoanalytic model
is almost certainly that of Julia Kristeva. Let us consider each in a
little more detail.
In Cixous, a quasi-Derridean antipathy to the dualisms of logocentric
thought becomes combined with de Beauvoir’s strong sense of woman
as subordinate term so as to produce a kind of feminist deconstruction.
Thus, for Cixous, logocentrism is inextricably connected to
phallocentrism: “the logocentric plan had always, inadmissably, been
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to create a foundation for (to found and fund) phallocentrism”. As
for Derrida, it is différance in writing, the difference of écriture feminine,
as Cixous terms it, that is subversive of all such dualisms. While Cixous
is certainly prepared to concede that not all men repress their femininity,
and even that some women “more or less strongly, inscribe their
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masculinity”, she nonetheless pursues the notion that women’s writing
somehow articulates the female body. Like the later Barthes, she
connects writing to jouissance: “the difference…becomes most clearly
perceived on the level of jouissance, inasmuch as a woman’s instinctual
economy cannot be identified by a man or referred to the masculine
economy”. In her 1975 essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Cixous
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argued for a much more explicitly physiological connection between
écriture féminine and the female body as a site of decentred eroticism:
“A woman’s body, with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor…will
make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with more
than one language… More so than men…women are body. More
body, hence more writing”. 48
Like Cixous, Irigaray too stresses the jouissance of the female body,
and its connectedness to that type of deconstructive pluralism so highly

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