Hélène Cixous and the Menstrual Bloggers
"But are they ever seething underneath!"
If you remember reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald in high school and wondering why all the female characters were infantile and nervous and never got a word in, this one’s for you. “I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do.”
In my last essay, I discussed Julia Kristeva’s argument that the semiotic-symbolic binary creates a border between the womb and the world. She suggests that language itself is gendered because it is a symbolic structure; mastering language requires a psychic separation from the maternal body.
In the same vein, Jacques Lacan wrote in “The Signification of the Phallus” that the structure of language is centered by the phallus since every subject comes to language by negotiating with the power of the ~Father Figure~ in the nuclear family.
(If you got your fill of psychoanalysis in college—or from those guys on Hinge who are always using the word Kafkaesque—and aren’t interested in this psychosexual stuff, feel free to skip a few paragraphs.)
Hélène Cixous, a contemporary of Kristeva’s, drew on those psychoanalytic ideas about language to warn women of the consequences of accepting a phallocentric literary canon in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” which was translated from French and published in the feminist academic journal Signs in 1976.
Cixous argues that the connection between language and phallic power, alongside the idea that language is representational, where one signifier is connected to one signified, means the subject position of the feminine is shoved out to the margins of the symbolic order. The masculine, by holding the scepter/sword of language that allows him to define the world in relation to himself, calls himself “center” and the feminine “other.”
That’s all to say that Western literature (and its pedagogy) is “phallogocentric”—a term coined by Certified Critical Theory Hunk Jacques Derrida. It privileges logic, loves a linear plot, hates plot holes and unnecessary adverbs. Cixous argues that these values alienate women’s writing and women’s lived experiences since female subjectivity is not signified by the phallus—it is not signified by any one thing.
Cixous also goes toe-to-toe with the psychoanalytic notion that the feminine is defined by “lack” because castration—the loss of the symbolic phallus—has already taken place. Sigmund Freud argued that since the threat of castration creates repression, the female unconscious is less repressed, implying that women are less able to control their urges and thoughts, more prone to irrationality.
“We’re stormy, and that which is ours breaks loose from us without our fearing any debilitation. Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking.”
Riding the gust of wind unfurled by that beautiful paragraph from “The Laugh of the Medusa,” a word: Grotesque.
Cixous argues that this storminess, the endless flowing, is what men used to convince them not to write. She coins the term “the logic of antilove” to describe how men have led women “to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs.” The logic of antilove taught women that they are supposed to live in denial of their bodies and their sexualities, to veil the grotesque with a monumental silence, to feel degraded by their lack: “Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster?”
Such self-denial is deadly, so Cixous calls women to write through their bodies instead of through the veil to make space for themselves on the fringe, the place where phallocentric culture casts the “other”: “Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.” Writing through the body instead of stepping on the throat in the name of order and logic is a writing style Cixous calls l’ecriture feminine.
Who can deploy l’ecriture feminine? Cixous warns that excluding anyone would violate the first rule: there are no rules. She notes that a reductive understanding of what feminine means—a feminism that fails to be inclusive—follows the logic of antilove and reinforces the centrality of the phallus: “Beware, my friend, of the signifier that would take you back to the authority of the signified! […] ‘Common’ nouns are also proper nouns that disparage your singularity by classifying it into species.”
A monolithic understanding of womanhood based on genitals/phenotype or the maternal function encloses it in a circle of white man’s making, so Cixous calls women to “Break out of the circles […] Take a look around, then cut though!” There is no general womanhood attached to a general body; every woman has a singular story to be told.
As Cixous calls women to use the individuality of the body to redefine self-identity in the context of their unique narratives, she seems to reference Derrida’s notion of linguistic play. The Regulation Poststructuralist Hottie said during a 1966 lecture titled “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” that since words’ meanings are always changing, always a bit ambiguous, the notion that there is a fixed center to human discourse is irrelevant. Accepting that the center is always moving allows those outside the center to relax and play a bit. Dance naked around the fire, if you will.
The most exciting thing about “The Laugh of the Medusa” to me is how Cixous reifies her argument with the essay itself. The form of her prose provides an example of l’ecriture feminine in its undulations, its loops and spins, its repetitions and run-ons that feel very oratory. It reminds me of how it feels to listen to a friend, a leader, even a stranger in a bar bathroom, when she gets talking about a subject she’s passionate about. Suddenly she’s speaking with this wide-eyed intensity that seems to rise up from some roiling energy source deep within her body.
Cixous calls women to write—"Write your self. Your body must be heard”—in order to decensor the relation to her sexuality, her strength, her pleasure, her suffering. She calls us to unlearn the phallogocentric manner of writing, the “superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty[.]”
I find inspiration for going about this work in Heroines by Kate Zambreno, in which the author writes herself in parallel with the “mad wives” of the modernist literary moment, exploring how “geniuses” like T.S. Eliot and Fitzgerald diagnosed and censored these women, called them crazy for wanting to make art. Through the entire brilliant book—an example of l’ecriture feminine in its form, too—Zambreno describes how women are driven away from writing still.
The act of writing is belittled and pathologized when it’s a woman doing it: male writing is painstaking, meticulous, solitary, while female writing is vomiting onto paper, menstrual, unmediated diary-writing. Zambreno writes that for woman artists, “The burst of creativity, the obsessive drive, will always be read as unmedicated, disordered, dangerous.” In Cixous’ words: “I know why you haven’t written. […] Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great—that is, for ‘great men’; and it’s ‘silly.’”
Zambreno writes about starting a blog and meeting other women bloggers making space for their voices on the internet. Easier done now, of course, than when writing the self was punishable by institutionalization or worse. In Zambreno’s talk of Tumblr blogs and Facebook communities, I find a bit of healing of the generational trauma that the Mad Wives passed down to the second-wave feminists, who then passed it down to us in the need to write/succeed like men to be valid:
“And in this subsubcommunity of literary blogs I’ve come into contact with, […] many of us also read and write like girls. It is perhaps not ‘serious’ criticism, but intensely personal and emotional. A new sort of subjectivity is developing online—vulnerable, desirous, well-versed in both pop culture and contemporary writing and our literary ancestors.”
I am reminded of T.S. Eliot writing in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which I resent on principle, that “The emotion of art is impersonal.” Zambreno writes that an internet figure called her and a set of other bloggers “menstrual.” It’s the excess they hate, the grotesque transgressing of borders. They see women creating “safe havens to be all sorts of identities at once,” and they hate our audacity to be ourselves.
I do miss the days of making internet girlfriends on Tumblr, creating an identity that could change the next day, the veritable ecriture feminine of all those text posts. But not to worry. Though our Tumblr days are over, the “new subjectivity” that both Zambreno and Cixous speak of is everywhere:
It’s Black women leading social justice movements that prioritize joy and make space for public grief, because phallogocentric models of change that exclude emotion don’t work.
It’s journalists changing the world with stories that centralize the voices of survivors even though such “anecdotal evidence” is rarely enough to convict a perpetrator in the phallogocentric court of law.
It’s an Instagram model writing about her exploitation and a princess writing about her miscarriage. Both of those stories could have been written by a journalist in interview form, but since each woman’s body was the subject, she seized the pen, possessing herself.
It’s young women taking to Twitter and TikTok to unleash the grotesque while wearing acrylic nails and zebra print bikinis, embodying the power of the feminine to rustle up male desire and then confuse it, laughing.
It’s migrant / Muslim / menopausal / incarcerated / trans / women writing poetry that exclaims singularity, plays in dialect, builds a thousand communities with a thousand tongues.
Thank you so much for reading this issue of Medusa’s Body. I have no idea what the next one will be about and I can’t promise it’ll be any shorter than this one :) One last block quote/benediction from “The Laugh of the Medusa” to take us home:
“Now women return from afar, from always: from ‘without,’ from the heath where witches are kept alive; from below, from beyond ‘culture’; from their childhood which men have been trying desperately to make them forget, condemning it to ‘eternal rest.’ The little girls and their ‘ill-mannered’ bodies immured, well-preserved, intact unto themselves, in the mirror. Frigidified. But are they ever seething underneath!”
Cixous Hélène, and Clément Catherine. The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Cixous Hélène. The Hélène Cixous Reader. Edited by Susan Sellers. London: Routledge, 1994.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Signification of the Phallus.” Translated by Alan Sheridan. Écrits: a selection. London: Routledge, 1977.
Zambreno, Kate. Heroines. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012.