Laugh All You Medusas! Hélène Cixous’ Écriture Feminine as Feminist Legal Translation, Transformation, Transgression, and Translactation in the Era of AI and the Anthropocene

Abstract

ABSTRACT This text considers Hélène Cixous’ écriture feminine (‘writing feminine’) as one way to do feminist legal translation. It discusses the importance of ‘writing one self’ as legal scholars in our own time as a reflection both on what law as well as what the self is or can be. To write one self through écriture feminine is a feminist act in contestation to the ‘phallocentric’ search for the law’s (phallo-)‘originary first term or logos’. Drawing on Yoriko Otomo’s feminist legal scholarship, I show that écriture feminine writes the world differently through the writing of the self; something which is urgently needed in a time of, as Anna Grear puts it, ‘necrotic, predatory imperative of Euro-centric petro-capitalism and rampant industrial consumerism’. Legal scholarship has often considered Cixous’ work in the context of ‘the linguistic turn’ – a turn that has been out of vogue for some time now. Hence, Cixous’ écriture feminine is rarely explicitly part of contemporary critical legal scholars’ efforts. In this text, however, I argue that Cixous’ scholarship, and her écriture feminine, is necessary to contemporary legal scholarship in its turn to new materialism, tech and AI: The feminist translation, transformation, transgression and translactation in écriture feminine interrupt the phallocentric predatory imperative embedded in the world such legal scholarship tries to make sense of and rework.