Writing and Displacement: Women in Theatre

Abstract

Being a woman is not enough. It takes more than that to write in the feminine mode and therefore to write in a different way — a fact which is daily corroborated by the abundance of work written by women, on women's issues, or dealing with women, letters, short stories, novels, all the literature of recent years, in which the writing often remains basically unchanged, even when it is expressed in new forms of thought, new ways of using the spoken or written word. Women artists, women writers, women critics in the avant—garde, following new trends or movements with their own forms of writing, are still confined to the masculine mode unless they shatter traditional discourse. Of course there are exceptions — Helene Cixous, Monique Wittig, Sylvia Plath and Emma Santos, for example. But we still lack the critical tools for judging this "difference," let alone for thinking it, for determining how and when it operates, or even for knowing whether, in the present state of feminist criticism, it can decide which paths to follow. The quest for this difference implies the rejection of all normativity and an exploration of the possible orientations for a new kind of writing specific to women. Luce Irigaray, a French feminist writer and critic, is paving the way for work in this direction.