Hélène Cixous

 Women lack cultural agency within patriarchy

 What would it mean for patriarchy to be overcome?
 Language plays a key role, along with other cultural productions
 How can women be put in a position of agency and then start the long, laborious process of
overcoming patriarchy
 Part of ‘New French Feminism’
o Post- Beauvoir
 She is a post-structuralist feminist
 Écriture Feminine
o Writing, female/feminine
 Sex/gender dispute
 Ambiguous and undecidable
 Meaning =
 female writing, writing by women
 Feminine writing, quality that could be described as feminine, could also
be practiced by men
 She is interested by men participating in this = not taking on the gender
roles they were given
o Not a theory but a practice
o A particular part of writing
o Emphasis on agency
 Language perpetuating patriarchal structure and being itself a patriarchal structure
 Seeks to bring language away from patriarchal dominance
 Seeks to convert females from simply passive listeners into active participants
 Allows women to express their own perception of the world
 Language skills
o Active = speaking and writing
o Passive = listening and reading
 Calling for women to put emphasis on active skills
Her Historical Background

 Born in Oran in French Algeria in 1937 into a Jewish family

 In 1975 she founded the first centre for women’s studies in Europe
 Les événtements 1968 = student led riots triggered by gender segregated dormitories
 Charles de Gauffe = he crushed these riots with is repressive social rules and paternalistic
authority
 General air of political and social revolution
 Cixous erose in the spirit of revolution
Her Intellectual Background

 20th century, French cultural life, key figures who had influence on her, just as she had influence
on them
o Jacques Derrida
  Greatly influenced by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud and Saussure
 Saussure = course in general linguistics “in language there are only key
differences and no positive terms”
 Linguistic sign = signified and signifier, no necessary connection
between the two but they each get their meaning from others of
themselves
o Jacques Lacan
 Post-structuralist psychoanalysist
 Deconstruction
o A practice, not a theory
o The object is a critique of, what Derrida calls, Logocentrism (or the metaphysics of
presence)
o The attempt to destabilize
o The issues with the very structure of metaphysics itself, western philosophy itself,
organised by ‘male’ terms, we can change the terms but the structure itself has remained
the same for the last 2500 years
 Logocentrism = the dominant trait of western philosophy, meaning the dominance of the logos
o Logos = reason/mind
o The Dominant vs The Supplement
 Dominant = form, mind, intellect, theory, culture, reason, logos, identity (ALL
ASSOCIATED WITH THE MALE) Validated and privileged
 Supplement = matter, body, sensibility, practice, nature, madness, writing,
difference (ASSOCIATED WITH THE FEMALE)
 Dualistic, binary structure