Page 80 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

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Écriture feminine The concepts of écriture feminine (woman’s writing) and le parler
femme (womanspeak) are associated with the feminist theorist Luce Irigaray and her
attempt to inscribe the feminine, or, as she would see it, to write the unwritable.
Irigaray theorizes a pre-symbolic ‘space’ or ‘experience’ for women constituted by
a feminine jouissance or sexual pleasure, play and joy, which is outside of
intelligibility. This is founded on the pre-Oedipal imaginary as the source of a
feminine that, it is argued, cannot be symbolized because it precedes entry into the
symbolic order. Since it is pre-symbolic it cannot be written, but through écriture
feminine Irigaray must try to do so.
Irigaray speculates on what she understands to be the ‘Otherness’ of the
feminine, and she seeks to ground this in the female body. Women are ‘Other’
because they are outside the specular (visual) economy of the Oedipal moment and
thus outside of representation (that is, of the symbolic order). Given that the
symbolic order lacks a grammar that could articulate the pre-Oedipal mother–
daughter relationship, the feminine, according to Irgaray, can return only in its
regulated form as man’s ‘Other’.
Irigaray explores the feminine as the constitutive exclusion of philosophy and
seeks to deconstruct a Western philosophy that she reads as guaranteeing the
masculine order and its claims to self-origination and unified agency. However,
Irigaray, like Derrida, is faced with the problem of trying to critique philosophy for
its exclusions while using the very language of that philosophy. Her strategy is to
‘mime’ the discourse of philosophy, that is, to cite it and talk its language but in
ways that question the capacity of philosophy to ground its own claims. Thus
écriture feminine mimes ‘phallogocentrism’ only to expose what is covered over.

Links Deconstruction, logocentricism, Oedipus complex, Other, phallocentric,
psychoanalysis

Emotion The concept of ‘emotion’ is not one commonly associated with culture or
cultural studies. However, it is included here as an example of how that which is
commonly associated with the body can also be understood in terms of culture.
Emotion has largely been thought of as a manifestation of brain biochemistry that
involves and invokes a range of physiological changes. As such, an emotion has
been thought to be in the domain of universal bodily responses that have been
forged in the context of our evolutionary history. On this basis, many
contemporary evolutionary theorists think that we have a set of ‘hard-wired’ basic
emotions (sadness, surprise, disgust, anger, anticipation, joy, acceptance, fear), and

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