Cixous: Laughing at the Oppositions

In English-speaking countries, Hélène Cixous is primarily known as a theorist of language and literature, and one whose works focus in particular on the sexual differences inherent in language. This is an especially pressing issue for a writer/speaker in the French language, since French is heavily gender-inflected, and any adjective attached to a speaking subject immediately alerts the reader/hearer to the issue of gender. Her project is Utopian: her writing seeks what she calls an écriture féminine (feminine/female writing), a writing that could adequately represent female/feminine positions in relation to culture.1 There has been a concentration on her interest in the body and writing, which she sees as linked because of the gender inflections of French, and this has led in turn to much criticism of her work because it sometimes appears to be dangerously essentialist, mixing up culture (language) and nature (bodies).