Page 142 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 133

The cultural politics of difference

Thus, for Cixous, logocentrism was inextricably connected to
phallocentrism: ‘the logocentric plan had always, inadmissibly,
been to create a foundation for (to found and fund) phallo-
centrism’ (Cixous & Clément, 1986, p. 65).
As with Derrida, it was différance in writing, the difference
of écriture féminine, as Cixous termed it, that would subvert such
dualisms. While she was prepared to concede that not all men
repress their femininity, even that some women ‘more or less
strongly, inscribe their masculinity’ (p. 81), she nonetheless
pursued the notion that women’s writing somehow articulated
the female body. Like the later Barthes, she connected 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 mas-
culine economy’ (p. 82). In her 1975 essay, ‘The Laugh of the
Medusa’, Cixous had argued for an 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’, she
wrote: ‘More so than men... women are body. More body, hence
more writing’ (Cixous, 1981, pp. 256–7).
Irigaray also stressed the jouissance of the female body, and
its connectedness to the type of deconstructive pluralism so
highly prized in post-structuralist thought. ‘Her sexuality...is
plural’, she observed: ‘Is this the way texts write themselves/are
written now?... woman has sex organs more or less everywhere.
She finds pleasure almost everywhere ...the geography of her
pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences,
more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined—in an
imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness’ (Irigaray,
1985, p. 28). This was a matter not only of writing, but also of
speech. For Irigaray, the female body gave rise to a distinctive
women’s language, parler femme, in which ‘“she” sets off in all
directions...in what she says... woman is constantly touching
herself’ (p. 29). Showalter’s insistence that ‘there can be no expres-
sion of the body which is unmediated by linguistic, social, and
literary structures’ (Showalter, 1985, p. 252) was, of course, true,

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