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These are themes very similar to those taken up by the poststructuralist theoretical feminists. Gilbert poses the question in her essay, "If the pen is a metaphorical penis, with what organ can females generate texts?" She finds her answer in images created by women writers. Cixous and Irigaray take up the same question, and use the poststructuralist ideas of Derrida and Lacan to come up with some provocative answers.

Helene Cixous takes up where Lacan left off, in noting that women and men enter into the Symbolic Order, into language as structure, in different ways, or through different doors, and that the subject positions open to either sex within the Symbolic are also different. She understands that Lacan's naming the center of the Symbolic as the Phallus highlights what a patriarchal system language is--or, more specifically, what a phallo(go)centric system it is.

This idea, that the structure of language is centered by the phallus, produced the word "phallocentric." Derrida's idea that the structure of language relies on spoken words being privileged over written words, produced the word "logocentric" to describe Western culture in general. Cixous and Irigaray combine the two ideas to describe Western cultural systems and structures as "phallogocentric," based on the primacy of certain terms in an array of binary oppositions. Thus a phallogocentric culture is one which is structured by binary oppositions-- male/female, order/chaos, language/silence, presence/absence, speech/writing, light/dark, good/evil, etc.--and in which the first term is valued over the second term; Cixous and Irigaray insist that all valued terms (male, order, language, presence, speech, etc.). are aligned with each other, and that all of them together provide the basic structures of Western thought.

Cixous follows Lacan's psychoanalytic paradigm, which argues that a child must separate from its mother's body (the Real) in order to enter into the Symbolic. Because of this, Cixous says, the female body in general becomes unrepresentable in language; it's what can't be spoken or written in the phallogocentric Symbolic order. Cixous here makes a leap from the maternal body to the female body in general; she also leaps from that female body to female sexuality, saying that female sexuality, female sexual pleasure, is unrepresentable within the phallogocentric Symbolic order.

To understand how she makes that leap, we have to go back to what Freud says about female sexuality, and the mess he makes of it. In Freud's story of the female Oedipus complex, girls have to make a lot of switches, from clitoris to vagina, from attraction to female bodies to attraction to male bodies, and from active sexuality to passive sexuality, in order to become "normal" adults Cixous rewrites this, via Lacan, by pointing out that "adulthood," in Lacan's terms, is the same as entering into the Symbolic and taking up a subject position. Thus "adulthood," or becoming a linguistic subject, for Cixous, means having only one kind of sexuality: passive, vaginal, heterosexual, reproductive. And that sexuality, if one follows Freud to his logical extreme, is not about female sexuality per se, but about male sexuality: the woman's pleasure is to come from being passively filled by a penis (remember, Freud defines activity as masculine, and passivity as feminine). So, Cixous concludes, there really isn't any such thing as female sexuality in and of itself in this phallogocentric system--it's always sexuality defined by the presence of a penis, and not by anything intrinsic to the female body or to female sexual pleasure.

If women have to be forced away from their own bodies--first in the person of the mother's body, and then in the person of their unique sexual feelings/pleasures--in order to become subjects in language, Cactus argues, is it possible for a woman to write at all? Is it possible for a woman to write as a woman? Or does entry into the Symbolic, orienting one's language around a center designated as a Phallus, mean that when one writes or speaks, one always does so as a "man"? In other words, if the structure of language itself is phallogocentric, and stable meaning is anchored and guaranteed by the Phallus, then isn't everyone who uses language taking up a position as "male" within this structure which excludes female bodies?

Cixous, and other poststructuralist theoretical feminists, are both outraged and intrigued by the possibilities for relations between gender and writing (or language use in general) that Lacan's paradigms open up. That's what Cixous means when she says (p. 309a) that her project has two aims: to break up and destroy, and to foresee and project. She wants to destroy (or perhaps just deconstruct) the phallogocentric system Lacan describes, and to project some new strategies for a new kind of relation between female bodies and language.

Lacan's description of the Symbolic (as illustrated by the pictures on p. 741 of the two doors) places women and men in different positions within the Symbolic in relation to the Phallus; men more easily misperceive themselves as having the Phallus, as being closer to it, whereas women (because they have no penises) are further from that center. Because of that distance from the Phallus, the poststructuralist theoretical feminists argue, women are closer to the margins of the Symbolic order; they are not as firmly anchored or fixed in place as men are; they are closer to the Imaginary, to images and fantasies, and further from the idea of absolute fixed and stable meaning than men are.

Because women are less fixed in the Symbolic than men, women-- and their language--are more fluid, more flowing, more unstable than men. It is worth noting here that when Cixous talks about women and woman, sometimes she means it literally, as the physical beings with vaginas and breasts, etc., and sometimes she means it as a linguistic structural position: "woman" is a signifier in the chain of signifiers within the Symbolic, just as "man" is; both have stable meaning ("woman" is the signifier attached to the signified of vagina and breasts (etc.)) because both are locked in place, anchored, by the Phallus as center of the Symbolic order. When Cixous says that woman is more slippery, more fluid, less fixed than man, she means both the literal woman, the person, and the signifier "woman".

Cixous' essay is difficult, not only because she's assuming we all know Freud and Lacan's formulations about female sexuality and about the structure of language, but also because she writes on two levels at once: she is always being both metaphoric and literal, referring both to structures and to individuals. When she says that "woman must write herself," "woman must write woman," she means both that women must write themselves, tell their own stories (much as the American feminists say women must tell their own stories) and that "woman" as signifier must have a (new) way to be connected to the signifier "I," to write the signifier of selfhood/subjecthood offered within the Symbolic order.

Cixous also discusses writing on both a metaphoric and literal level. She aligns writing with masturbation, something that for women is supposed to be secret, shameful, or silly, something not quite adult, something that will be renounced in order to achieve adulthood, just like clitoral stimulation has to be renounced in favor of vaginal/reproductive passive adult sexuality. For women to write themselves, Cixous says, they must (re)claim a female-centered sexuality. If men write with their penises, as Gilbert argues, then Cixous says before women can write they have to discover where their pleasure is located. (And don't be too quick to decide that women write with their clitorises. It's not quite that simple).

Cixous also argues that men haven't yet discovered the relation between their sexuality and their writing, as long as they are focused on writing with the penis. "Man must write man," Cixous says, again focusing on "man" as a signifier within the Symbolic, which is no more privileged than "woman" as a signifier. In an important footnote, Cixous explains that men's sexuality, like women's, has been defined and circumscribed by binary oppositions (active/passive, masculine/feminine), and that heterosexual relations have been structured by a sense of otherness and fear created by these absolute binaries. As long as male sexuality is defined in these limited and limiting terms, Cixous says, men will be prisoners of a Symbolic order which alienates them from their bodies in ways similar to (though not identical with) how women are alienated from their bodies and their sexualities. Thus, while Cixous does slam men directly for being patriarchal oppressors, she also identifies the structures which enforce gender distinctions as being oppressive to both sexes.

She also links these oppressive binary structures to other Western cultural practices, particularly those involving racial distinctions. On 310 she follows Freud in calling women the "dark continent," and expands the metaphor by reference to Apartheid, to demonstrate that these same binary systems which structure gender also structure imperialism: women are aligned with darkness, with otherness, with Africa, against men who are aligned with lightness, with selfhood, and with Western civilization. In this paragraph, note that Cixous is referring to women as "they," as if women are non-speakers, non-writers, whom she is observing. "As soon as they begin to speak, at the same time as they're taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black:"--i.e. entry into the Symbolic order, into language, into having a self and a name, is entry into these structures of binary oppositions.

Cixous argues that most women do write and speak, but that they do so from a "masculine" position; in order to speak, women (or "woman") has assumed she needed a stable, fixed system of meaning, and thus has aligned herself with the Phallus which stabilizes language. There has been little or no "feminine" writing, Cixous says (p. 311). In making this statement, she insists that writing is always "marked," within a Symbolic order that is structured through binary opposites, including "masculine/feminine," in which the feminine is always repressed. Remember here, when Cixous speaks of "feminine," it is both literal and metaphoric--it's something connected to femaleness, to female bodies, and something which is a product of linguistic positioning. So Cixous is arguing that only women could produce feminine writing, because it must come from their bodies, AND she is arguing that men could occupy a structural position from which they could produce feminine writing.

Cixous coins the phrase "l'ecriture feminine" to discuss this notion of feminine writing (and masculine writing, its phallogocentric counterpart). She sees "l'ecriture feminine" first of all as something possible only in poetry (in the existing genres), and not in realist prose. Novels, she says on p. 311, are "allies of representationalism"--they are genres (particularly realist fiction) which try to speak in stable language, language with one-to-one fixed meanings of words, language where words seemingly point to things (and not to the structure of language itself). In poetry, however, language is set loose--the chains of signifiers flow more freely, meaning is less fixed; poetry, Cixous says, is thus closer to the unconscious, and thus to what has been repressed (and thus to female bodies/female sexuality). This is one model she uses to describe what "l'ecriture feminine" looks like. (It is worth noting, however, that all the poets and "feminine" writers Cixous mentions specifically are men.)

Such feminine writing will serve as a rupture, or a site of transformation or change; she means "rupture" here in the Derridean sense, a place where the totality of the system breaks down and one can see a system as a system or structure, rather than simply as "the truth." Feminine writing will show the structure of the Symbolic as a structure, not as an inevitable order, and thus allow us to deconstruct that order.

There are two levels on which "l'ecriture feminine" will be transformative, Cixous argues (p. 311-312), and these levels correspond again to her use of the literal and the metaphoric, or the individual and the structural. On one level, the individual woman must write herself, must discover for herself what her body feels like, and how to write about that body in language. Specifically, women must find their own sexuality, one that is rooted solely in their own bodies, and find ways to write about that pleasure--which Cixous, following Lacan, names "jouissance." On the second level, when women speak/write their own bodies, the structure of language itself will change; as women become active subjects, not just beings passively acted upon, their position as subject in language will shift. Women who write--if they don't merely reproduce the phallogocentric system of stable ordered meaning which already exists (and which excludes them)--will be creating a new signifying system; this system may have built into it far more play, more fluidity, than the existing rigid phallogocentric symbolic order. "Beware, my friend," Cixous writes toward the end of the essay (p. 319) "of the signifier that would take you back to the authority of a signified!"