Ecriture Feminist Analysis

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Patriarchy defines woman as incomplete, dark, passive, irrational and reduces her as the ‘Other’. Woman internalizes the patriarchal definitions of femininity. Patriarchy conditions woman to be frightened and disgusted of her own sexuality and surrender her body and her individuality to the masculine order. The female body becomes a space colonized by man and patriarchal values. The domain of writing has also been colonized by male writers where woman has no space rather than to abide by the traditional practice of writing. Hélène Cixous, a French feminist, seeks to subvert the patriarchal order by establishing a connection between the female body and writing. Through her ‘Écriture Féminine’, she urges women to deconstruct the patriarchal laws…show more content…
This background with mixed cultural heritage condemned and banned her to a state of exclusion and exile, driving her desperately in search of her home and identity. Her bitter personal experience of oppositions between master/ slave set the grounds to champion the cause of women’s liberation from gendered binary oppositions which relegates the feminine to the role of the other or the negative in hierarchies which society constructs. Cixous theory of Écriture Féminine is a feminine from of writing that deconstructs the constraints of phallocentric thought to liberate womanhood through a rediscovery of the feminine body towards the path of intellectual goal and freedom in society. Cixous asserts that social structures cannot be dissociated from linguistic structures. Language, a tool for communication is inextricably linked to history and society. Besides, Cixous believes that language itself is an agent of women’s oppression because writing has always been done in the name of the father and to counteract this repression, she invites women to Écriture…show more content…
Lacan draws heavily on the fundamental concepts of Freud and reviews them through language, the version of linguistics developed by Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson. Lacan brings to light that words are not the things they represent, but merely substitutes for them and that a signifier is always defined in relation to the other signifier in an endless chain of signifiers. With reference to gender development, Lacan affirms that woman is always defined with reference to man because he is the Subject and she is the Other. Lacan retraces and alters Freud’s model of the Oedipal complex but insists on its basis in language. He argues that the newborn child has no sense of differentiation between himself and the universe around him. He is the centre of his own universe and enjoys the dyadic unity with the nourishing mother. This is Freud’s pre-oedipal stage which Lacan interprets as the pre-linguistic or the Imaginary realm. To gain entry into the culture of the universe, the child splits away from its mother, the primitive source of pleasure and comfort. The child learns that the father is the source of power in the family and in the world. Freud’s child identifies with the father when he discovers that the female body has no penis. Fearing the punishment of a similar castration he
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    of The Laugh of the Medusa, focuses solely on the hostility toward the patriarchal binaries. Cixous believes that feminine writing is connected to the body and she views feminine sexuality as multiple and resourceful. Cixous proposed the idea of écriture féminine which tries to eliminate all cultural oppressions by creating a subversive language. The concept of body and sexuality is very

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