The Laugh Of The Medusa Cultural Studies Essay

The Laugh Of The Medusa Cultural Studies EssayThe principal(prenominal) reason for choosing the above critics and their respective essays is that in spite of appearance wowork forces rightist theories, Cixous often comes to be associated with French womens rightist psychoanalytic theorists like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. In addition both critical essays be dreaded with penning the body.By the early eighties, womens liberationists had advanced to a confrontational encounter on male supremacy, advocating a complete overthrow of the biased (male) canon of literature. French feminists, like Helene Cixous and Luce Irigary claimed that women should have a greater consciousness of their bodies when piece of writing, a occasion which would create a more h mavenst and appropriate style of openness, fragmentation and non-linearity. Both feminist critics seem to have similar agendas mixing radical abbreviation with Lacanian and Freudian scheme in order to deconstruct patriarc hal hegemony in the connected real, symbolic and imaginary orders. Hence their unorthodox prose, a reaction against and within a symbolic order complicit in domination.Cixous first reading of the essay The Laugh of the Medusa reveals like an impassioned call to action and a feminist manifesto in which women are urged to write themselves out(a) of the world men constructed for women. Using the first person, plural and imperative statements, Cixous urges women to put themselves the unth sign adapted/unthought into wrangling (Putnam Tong, 1998). She pledges for the invention of a pertly insurgent writing that will allow women to deconstruct the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system. Therefore the purpose of the essay under analysis is to afford up and destroy a type of men writing which has functioned as an instrument of patriarchal expression and which has become a locus where the repression of women has been for too bulky perpetuated.In the same line of thought, I rigary pledges in her essay This Sex Which Is Not One (1977) for promoting womens language which is viewed as far richer than mens language in that it does not take on only one thread. It is advanced the idea that womens writing is capable of constantly creating the other heart and soul (Irigary 204) generating an incomprehensible multiplicity of meanings which are unable to remain immobilized, and accordingly impossible to be included into patterns of grammatical gender and behavior imposed by the dominant patriarchal cultural and well-disposed norms.Writing and language become the main concepts of the essays under analysis and the centers around which all the other notions like maidenly/masculine sexual activity, identity, ideologies and power revolve. The concept of writing, most often hereafter referred to as criture feminine is perceived as one important transformational tool if one is tinted with changing the social, cultural and political masculine economy. It is impa rdonable, as Cixous puts it that there has not hitherto been any writing that inscribes feminity (Cixous 2042). Assuming that language is not a neutral medium it follows that writing is realised in a discourse of dealing social, political, and linguistic, and these relations are characterized in a masculine or feminine economy. In this model, patterns of linearity and exclusion (patriarchal logic) require a strict hierarchical organization of (sexual) struggle in discourse and give a grossly exaggerated view of the sexual opposition actually inherent to language. Sexual opposition has ever so been inclusive to writing and is thus incriminated, this being one reason for women never having the possibility to speak as writing has always favored men, it worked for mans profit to the point of minify writing to his laws (Cixous 2050).Irigarys critical vision is therefore in agreement with Cixous ideas in that both point in negative terms to womens underdeveloped condition which stem s from their endurance to an oppressive culture. To this oppression, the feminist critics oppose a type of consciousness raising appeal as the main political base which would presumably be able to counteract the so-called amputation of power (Irigary 205). Also a re-vision of the previous historical and cultural activity is needed backed by the critical force of feminist tradition.Therefore the rupture from the phallocentric tradition is indispensable as a means of safety valve for women. Like male sexuality, masculine writing, which Cixous usually termed phallogocentric writing, is as well in conclusion tiresome and furthermore stamped with the official seal of social approval, masculine writing is too weighted down to move or change. Womens writing expressed a rum female consciousness, which was more discursive and conjunctive than the male one. Such consciousness was completely different, and had been unfavorably treated. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex studied the way s in which legislators, priests, philosophers, writers and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of women is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. Women had been induced the idea of inferiority and, although men theoretically supported equality, they would fair game its implementation.Cixous essay in an attempt to define criture feminine which favors experience over language and a type of non-linear, cyclical flow, actually lists one condition as the main prerequisite for bringing about some mutations in human relations to destroy the sexual oppositions, as well as the distinction mingled with feminine/masculine writing (Cixous 2046). Such thread which aims at destroying the artificial power and cultural constructs is also favored by Irigary who militates against the type of idea base on sexism and disjunctive political discourses the power of slaves (Irigary 205) would eventually collapse the binary thought inherent to Western tradition and would u ndo the logocentric ideology and proclaim adult female as the source of life, power and energy.In doing this, one would necessarily destroy the phallocratic ideology which has been responsible for the symbolic annihilation of women (Tuchman, 1978). This annihilation serves to confirm that the roles of wife, mother and housewife, etc., are the fate of women in a patriarchal society. Women have been socialized into performing these roles by cultural representations that attempt to make them appear to be the natural exclusive right of women.Furthermore, within the context of mass media, men and women have been represented in conformity with the cultural stereotypes that serve to reproduce handed-down sex roles. Thus men are usually shown as being dominant, active, aggressive and authoritative, performing a variety of important and varied roles that often requires professionalism, efficiency, rationality and strength to be carried out success in fully. Women by contrast are usually s hown as being subordinate, passive, submissive and marginal, performing a limited number of secondary and uninteresting tasks confined to their sexuality, their emotions and their domesticity. The concern being voiced here is that this symbolic annihilation of women means that women, their lives and their interests are not being accurately reflected. Therefore, to Cixous, the practice of criture fminine is part of an ongoing concern with exclusion, with the transformation of subjectivity, and the struggle for identity.Moreover women in Western thought has represented the Other that can confirm mans identity as Self, as rational thinking being (Beauvoir, 1949). The concept of Self, she writes, can be produced only in opposition to that of not-self, so that the category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. To constitute himself as Subject, man has constructed muliebrity as Other she is the incidental, the inessential as distant to him, the Subject.Cixous voice acqu ires vehement tonalities militating for womens inscribing in language in a new-fangled articulation of feminine drives, libido and sex insinuating into texts as a means of liberation from their repressed sexuality and also as a means to changing the meaning of history Let the priests tremble, were going to show them our sexts (Cixous 2048). criture fminine could certainly prove itself extremely prodigious in its infinite and mobile complexity as opposed to masculine writing which is perceived as governed by the phallus, a type of super-egoized machinery which is synonymous with the history of reasoning separating body from the text and ultimately rejecting female-sexed texts. As a result of this policy of exclusion, the true potential of many women goes unfulfilled.The reason behind this policy of exclusion is the most blamed dogma of castration which Cixous finds responsible for the sublation of the phalologocentric, a self-admiring and self-congratulatory tradition which censors the body and implicitly the speech, Freuds concept of castration anxiety. Irigary suggests the same type of Freudian reading through her mentioning of mens foraging for a social status and scholarship head/man/phallus/symbol of power. Freud argued that this castration anxiety stems from a fear of female genitalia, perceived by males at a subconscious take as the result of castration the female body understood subconsciously as lacking a phallus. Freud suggested that the mythical story of Medusa, in which people shimmer to stone when they look at the snake-covered head of the Gorgon, could be read as addressing this psychoanalytic fear.It follows that Cixous and Irigary argue, following many theorists, that this masculine view of women as lacking has broader social and political implications our sexuality and the language in which we communicate are inextricably linked. To free one means freedom for the other. To write from ones body is to flee reality, to escape hierarchical bon ds and thereby come closer to what Cixous calls joissance, which can be defined as a virtually metaphysical fulfilment of desire that goes far beyond mere satisfaction It is a fusion of the erotic, the mystical, and the political (Gilbert xvii). Cixous definition of jouissance is that which operates outside of patriarchy, in the realm of the feminine Imaginary and is a crucial concept since it is the source of womens writing and of prisonbreak the Law of the Father.The Laugh of the Medusa and This Sex Which Is Not One also draw on the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Lacan displaying an interest in connecting language, psyche and sexuality. Lacans theory develops the notion of the development of the (male) ego from Pre-Oedipal (non-linguistic) Imaginary to Symbolic via the castration complex which is both a sexual and linguistic model. The Imaginary is fashioned as a feminine space (connected to the body, the mother, the breast). The Symbolic is associated with the Law of the Father and is a condition of having acquired language and sexual difference.The current essays seem to reject the feminine Imaginary which is non-signifying or outside of language. In order to express her opposition, Cixous uses Doras case of aphonia which is considered to be the true mistress of the Signifier, replacing the phallus as the privileged Signifier from Lacans theory. Dora, the interpret hysterical woman, like Medusa, could be read as a mythological figure, examples of women who speak their body and threaten patriarchy. They have the capacity to continue to interrogate and ultimately to deconstruct the Law of the Father. Doras words coming to us in twisted form rebel against the master/author of her story giving access to commodious resources of the unconscious, de-censoring body and speech. The Laugh of the Medusa, therefore, revises the Freudian model which defines woman as lack, once again alluding to the Law of the Father which is ruled by the fear of castr ation, and instead celebrates woman as excess.The fear of decapitation or castration should no longer be perceived as a threat at least for women. They always had the capacity to depropriate themselves. Woman is a whole that is made up of parts that in themselves are whole She is indefinitely other in herself (Irigary 204). Woman is also perceived as extremely complex and subtle in the geography of her pleasure which would be able to generate a connection between womens bodies and the making of meaning in a continuous play of signifier which would disrupt the symbolic former order of language.A similar standpoint is made by Cixous who states that this endless body has no end or parts, thus woman libido is cosmic (Cixous 2051). Woman does not perform the regionalization on herself as masculine sexuality does, her Eros is not organized around any one sun, is not centralized, therefore woman language is not a solid opaque block, and a flow which displays meaning into a multiplicity of signifiers without contours or frontiers woman is changeable and open, a cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros (Cixous 2051) which lacks repressive patterning and rejects logocentrism, or phallogocentrism. Thus it is suggested that the feminine writing is a way of signifying that calls into question or disrupts the Law of the Father because it will give access to women native strength and sexuality and un-coax conventions. Along with this rupture there comes a dislocation of language.In addition, womens writing is also described in terms of childbirth a metaphor for the vast resources of feminine creativity. By extension, womens writing is described using imagery such as the mothers voice/body/milk write in white ink (Cixous 2045), therefore a desired ease up to the pre-Oedipal stage where binaries were absent. Drawing on the resources of the Imaginary, mining its depths, women are urged in both above-mentioned essays to invent another history, one which is outside of narratives of power, inequality and oppression, and which figures itself in our language and on our bodies.The upheaval of these transformations is made possible through the process of collapsing the binary oppositions in which woman has functioned as a negative term, always referring back to its opposite pair which annihilated its energy and causing woman to function within the discourse of man. Therefore a return to Pre-Oedipal stage is suggested, a return to a time before the creation of oppositional binaries prior to the imposition of the categories of male and female. This is the period associated with the mothers body. In this way, Cixous notion of feminine writing can be both feminine and non-essentialist, although this latter assertion is a matter of considerable debate amongst Cixous critics. Therefore the oppositions do not limit themselves to the traditional antagony male/female, but extend beyond it to a logic of the One and a logic of heterogenity and multiplicity which suggest that it is high time the phallocentric tradition be replaced by an infinite richness of individual subjectivities.The body entering the text disrupts the masculine economy of superimposed linearity the feminine is the overflow of luminous torrents, a margin of excess eroticism and free-play not directly attributable to the fixed hierarchies of masculinity. Hierarchical structures are shaken and subjective differences are encouraged so that criture fminine could emerge as a way of overcoming the limits of Western logocentrism Almost everything is yet to be written by women about feminity, sexuality, infinite and mobile complexity (Cixous 2049). The new feminine language, which yet needs to be invented, would be able to collapse partitions, classes and code sweeping away syntax. At the end of the phallic era, women are envisaged as having two possible alternatives they either give up any aspiration and become annihilated, or raise against their submissive and passive role to reach their fu ll incandescence.Writing becomes therefore the main imperative for women. They are asked to think differently, to leave behind the psychoanalytic labels and laws of the signifier which would only alter the generative powers of feminine writing In one another we will never be lacking (Cixous 2056). Therefore writing is the passageway, entrance, exit, and dwelling of the other. For man this non-exclusion is seen as a threat, as intolerable. maidenlike writing keeps alive the other, as love is not perceived in economic terms any longer.