écriture feminine
(feminine writing)

"Ecris-toi: il faut que ton corps se fasse entendre. Alors jailliront les immenses ressources de l'inconscient" (Write yourself. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth).
-- Helene Cixous, "Le rire de la Meduse," (The Laugh of the Medusa)

In her 1975 essay "Le rire de la Meduse" (The Laugh of the Medusa), Helene Cixous explained the invention of a new writing that would allow women to "transform their history, to seize the occasion to speak." Accessible to men and women alike, but representing "female sexual morphology," l'écriture feminine sought a way of writing which literally embodied the female. According to Elaine Showalter, it is "the inscription of the feminine body and female difference in language and text." However, as Cixous explains, it is impossible to pin down any tidy definition or theorization of the term:

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded--which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse taht regulates the phallocentric system (Laugh of the Medusa).

Along with French feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Cixous's work draws on the writings of Jacques Lacan. The Lacanian model comes out of the work of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the French structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The importance of this constellation of theorists is an interest in connecting language, psyche, and sexuality.

There are, of course, some problems or challenges associated with the idea. First, even its most fervent fans avoided defining exactly what constituted the style of l'écriture feminine, as any definition would then categorize it and safely subsume it as a genre under the linear patriarchal structure. Its very restlessness and ambiguity defied identification as part of its identity. Second, men may try their hands at writing woman's bodies, but only a woman whose very biology gave her an edge, could read these texts successfully -- risking marginalization and ghettoization of both women's literature and theory. Lastly, the idea has been charged with racism, as it rarely referred to racial or class differences between women and largely referred to a white woman's literary tradition.