Politicizing the Féminine, Globalizing the Feminist

Abstract

Politics and the Feminine1 Women write their bodies, mother's milk. This image from Helene Cixous' text, The Laugh of the Medusa,2 has left feminists divided over how to respond to its underlying imperative. As a celebration of female sexuality as located within a libidinal economy, it participates one of the most important traditions of feminist practice: the positive reinscription of woman as a being engendered difference, by means unique to her by virtue of her collective historically and culturally designated identity. For the history of female oppression under the structures of patriarchy, this tactic of refusing repression, along with the determination to exist on her own terms, and to make known Her/story,s has been and remains immensely significant. Interpreted as a strategy of agency, Cixous' work locates the female subject within the female body, the body being a masculist metaphor for both the noncerebral nature of women and the location of woman's essence. Appropriated as a place from which women can act, instead of a site of masculist-imposed passivity, the female body becomes the source of a newfound feminine voice heard confidently speaking through an ecriture feminine. Woman writes herself, in white ink. The relationship between the libido and female sexual organs, that is, the feminine and the female4 implicated this portrait, has obvious problems. The body language and maternal metaphor5 employed by Cixous may be elucidated as an overly determined association be