Writing the Body Toward an Understanding of l’Ecriture feminine by Ann Rosalind Jones I.        French Feminism A.     Common agreement between French feminists 1.      Western thought has been based on a systematic repression of women's experience. B.     Comparison 1.      Opposes on masculinist thinking 2.      Western culture as fundamentally oppressive, and phallogocentric 3.      Men objectifies the world through Symbolic discourse 4.      Resistance does take place in the form of jouissance 5.      Oppose women's bodily experience to the phallic-symbolic patterns embedded in Western thought http://personal.wofford.edu/~hitchmoughsa/Writing.html

Contrast 1. Kristeva: 2. Irigaray + Cixous: a.      Women have been prevented from expressing their sexuality in itself b.      Women must begin with their sexuality, bodies c.      Speak in the new languages it calls for, they will establish a point of view (a site of différence)

French Feminists A.     Julia Kristeva 1.      Finds in psychoanalysis the concept of the bodily drives that survive cultural pressure in semiotic discourse (the gestural, rhythmic, language) 2.      Women, speak and write as hysterics 3.      Semiotic style: repetitive, spasmodic, separations 4.      Women should persist in challenging the discourses that stand 5.      The word “woman" represents as an attitude, men also have access to the jouissance (the emergence of bodily drive) that opposes phallogocentrism

Luce Irigaray 1. Women is different from men 2.      A world structured by man-centered a.      Women has no way of knowing or representing themselves b.      Women’s bodies and sexual pleasure have been absent or misrepresented in male discourse. 3.      A diffuse sexuality arising: two lips of the vulva, multiplicity of libidinal energies. 4.      Female sexuality v.s logic and language 5.      Women must recognize and assert their jouissance

Hé1ène Cixous 1. Women’s unconscious is totally different from men's 2.      Level of sexual pleasure is different 3.      The Laugh of the Medusa a.      Female sexuality is superior to phallic single mindedness b.      Masculine is inscribed within boundaries c.      Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious, is worldwide 4.      Link women's diffuse sexuality to women's language- written language 5.      Insists on the primacy of multiple, specifically female libidinal impulses in women's unconscious

Critique A.     Idealist and essentialist: Can the body be a source of self- knowledge? B.     Sexuality is not an innate quality, sexuality is not a natural given, but rather is the consequence of social interactions, among people and among signs C.     Sexist ideologies D.     What about variations in class, in race, and in culture among women? E.      Materialist feminists’ critique F.      Whether the assertion of a shared female nature made by féminité can help us in feminist action toward a variety of goals G.     Colette Guillaumin, arguing along similar lines in Questions féministés , points out that the psychic characteristics praised by advocates of féminité have in fact been determined by the familial and economic roles imposed on women by men. H.     The author’s critique 1.      It neglects differences among women 2.      Understand and respect the diversity 3. A monolithic vision of shared female sexuality

Proposed Solutions A. To move outside the binary opposite B.     Analyze the power-relationship C.     Can the body be the source of a new discourse , Is it possible to move from that state of unconscious excitation directly to a written female text D.     But psychoanalytic theory and social experience both suggest that the leap from body to language is especially difficult for women 1.      Working against the concrete difficulties and the prejudices surrounding women's writing 2.      Indebted to the "body" of earlier women writers 3. Recognize it as a conscious response to socialiterary realities

Monique Wittig A.     She is suspicious both of the oppositional thinking that defines woman in terms of man and of the mythical-idealist strain in certain formulations of féminité Focus on women among themselves

Recognition A.     The critique of phallocentrism in all the material and ideological forms it has taken B.     The call for new representations of women's consciousness