Elmer's English 304 Magazine
Strategies of Difference and Opposition
by Elmer G. Wiens
Guilty | Immortality
In "The Laugh of the Medusa," Hélène Cixous constructs a programme that different
Elmer's English 304 Magazine
Strategies of Difference and Opposition
by Elmer G. Wiens
Guilty | Immortality
In "The Laugh of the Medusa," Hélène Cixous constructs a programme that differentiates feminine writing from masculine writing. According to Cixous, Western civilization privileges masculine reasoning and meanings and depreciates the experience of women. The masculine languages of society perpetuate the male domination of women. To subvert these conventional languages fostered by patriarchal societies, Cixous develops écriture féminine — feminine writing — emphasizing the feelings and experiences of women. Cixous' weapon is the female body. She demands that women write about "women and bring women to writing" by asserting the female body (2039). By using the female body as a medium of discourse, Cixous differentiates feminine writing from masculine writing that has been produced under patriarchal authority. Cixous' feminist agenda for writing rejects strategies that oppose masculine modes of discourse. Instead, Cixous undertakes strategies of diffemeránce — strategies that defer and differ from male methods. With Cixous' approach, feminists can construct a programme for sexual difference, create their own history, and develop a different understanding of society's relation to nature.
Feminists use the term "logocentrism" to express how male sexuality and masculine language impose meanings onto words, and influence perceptions of reality. Cixous maintains logocentric thinking focuses on the phallus. Masculine thinking centres on the conviction that appeals to reason using Platonic philosophy will produce truth. Women who function within masculine thinking restrict themselves to the range of its logocentric vocalizations. A woman who uses a language centred on the phallus writes as a man. Cixous' stratagem thwarts masculine strategies of control inherent in masculine, oral discourses. Language centred on the phallus snares women into silence. By writing through their bodies, women acquire speech independent of the phallus (2044). Cixous' strategy of writing soars beyond the barriers of the "old patterns" of thinking that repressed women's sexuality. Her writing creates a feminine vocal domain, centred on female "erotogeneity," constructed of fantasies during masturbation (2040). This sphere of écriture féminine exists independently, being deferred differently from the phallogocentric meanings of words provided by the phallus centred logos. In this context, the term logos represents more than the Greek word for reason, implying society as presently constituted.
Inspired by Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, Cixous questions the adequacy of the "either/or logics" of Western philosophy predicated on binary oppositions, such as male and female, culture and nature, presence and absence, and good and evil. Derrida questions Western philosophy's privileging of the spoken over the written, a bias preempting feminine writing and the reality of women in culture. By emphasizing the written, Derrida exposes the discrepancy between a word's signifier and its signified, and renders unstable the meaning of any text. Cixous inserts her signifieds of the female body into this gap, rupturing the structure of the logos (Cixous 2051). Conditioned on sexual difference instead of sexual opposition, feminine signifiers operate independently of negated masculine signifiers. The signifiers of feminine writing are absorbed throughout the open sphere of meanings spanned by the female body's signification, and map into the realm of écriture féminine. Reterritorializing their bodies by writing, women create a language with an interior "to get inside of," a place of feminine jouissance (2050).
Cixous blocks dialectic's logic of contradiction which presents a woman's status as a man lacking a penis. Privileging "the phallus as the symbol and source of power" colonizes women in society, relegating them to a passive, supportive role for men's active role (2040-41). Historically, language empowers men and subjugates women, and impedes society's adjustment to sexual and gender equality. Cixous disrupts semiotics' structure of communication which posits persisting links between signifiers and signifieds determined by the logos. Using strategies that defer and differ to work the in-between, she exploits Derrida's differánce, "the obliterated origin of absence and presence," to write a programme for sexual difference with its own history (Derrida 143). Cixous refuses to engage in the confrontation games pitting feminine representations against masculine representations of truth. Questioning Freud's psychoanalytic theories, she states that Freud incorrectly turns Medusa into a monster by associating the snakes of her head with women's denial of castration. Within écriture féminine, Cixous sees Medusa as a beautiful woman laughing (2048).
Cixous' perception of Medusa relates intimately to feminists' theories of the gaze. Men look at women differently than women look at one another, and the way women look at men. Sexual desire conditions the gaze, while fantasies constructed socially through language determine desire. Consequently, Derrida's theory of the instability of the meaning of words relates to desire, the gaze, and the impossibility of satisfying desire. Cixous links her desires to a "passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity" involving masturbation and writing (2040). Her body's rapture into "luminous torrents" creates beautiful compositions that "parental-conjugal phallocentrism" considers sick and monstrous (2040). Cixous urges women to "write and proclaim this unique empire" that legitimizes feminine beauty, and to break from the discourses that kept women in the dark from each other (2040). The masculine 