'The Laugh of the Medusa' by Hélène Cixous
Provocative, anti-essentialist and an antecedent to the queer theory, the French writer and philosopher's 1975 essay explores her theory of 'writing the body'.
It is time for women to start scoring their feats in written and oral language.
Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away - that's how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak - even just open her mouth - in public. A double distress, for even if she transgresses, her words fall almost always upon the deaf male ear, which hears in language only that which speaks in the masculine.
It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech that has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic; that is, in a place other than silence. Women should break out of the snare of silence. They shouldn't be conned into accepting a domain that is the margin or the harem.
Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn't painfully lost her wind). She doesn't ‘speak', she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it's with her body that she vitally supports the ‘logic' of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materialises what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she's saying, because she doesn't deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. Her speech, even when ‘theoretical' or political, is never simple or linear or ‘objectified', generalised: she draws her story into history.
There is not that scission, that division made by the common man between the logic of oral speech and the logic of the text, bound as he is by his antiquated relation - servile, calculating - to mastery. From which proceeds the niggardly lip service that engages only the tiniest part of the body, plus the mask.
In women's speech, as in their writing, that element that never stops resonation, which, once we've been permeated by it, profoundly and imperceptibly touched by it, retains the power of moving us - that element is the song; first music from the first voice of love that is alive in every woman. Why this privileged relationship with the voice? Because no woman stockpiles as many defences for countering the drives as does a man. You don't build walls around yourself, you don't forego pleasure as ‘wisely' as he. Even if phallic mystification has generally contaminated good relationships, a woman is never far from ‘mother' (I mean outside her role functions: the ‘mother' as non-name and as source of goods.) There is always within her at least a little of that good mother's milk. She writes in white ink.
Extract from Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa' in Signs, 1 (4), trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, 1976, pp. 875-893 (originally published in French 1975); reprinted in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, University of Massachusetts Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981, pp. 245-264