In my final years of Sixth Form, I became mildly obsessed with the writings of French scholar Hélène Cixous and more specifically her essay Le Rire de la Médus, known in English as The Laugh of The Medusa.
At the time, I was studying Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber which saw me immersed in a world of feminist phantasmagoria intertwined with sexual violence. I sometimes wonder why texts which contain so much violence against women (even in a subversive sense) are put on curricula, as though the topic were only one of fiction and not the lived reality of people in the classroom, but I digress.
Through my extra reading, I somehow stumbled across Cixous’s writing. It immediately piqued my interest. Written in 1975 and translated in the following year, The Laugh Of The Medusa exalts not only the necessity of writing for women but also proposes that we can create new tools that allow us to embrace a mode of self-expression which extends beyond what others expect of us. . In short, we can be trapped in a language, a body, a world that does not allow us the full range of expression - or we can adopt the écriture féminine and be free.
The écriture féminine is broadly speaking a style of writing which rejects conventional styles found in patriarchal systems and instead encourages women to write and to bring others to writing so that they can, quite literally, change the narrative about themselves.
What draws a teenage girl to an essay in a language she doesn’t understand, written thirty years before she was born? For starers, if there was one skill I had mastered by age 18, it was hating my body. After all, it was the predominant messaging I had around me. Reading Cixous was the first time I was able to pinpoint that self-hatred is clearly a tool of the patriarchy and moreover, a tool which reduces women to what we lack as opposed to what we have.
And then, there was the wanking. Do you know how alarming it was that the first time I ever had a conversation about masturbation in my eighteen years of education was because I was a massive swot who loved to read essays? Discussions of graphic sexual violence? Normal classroom discussion. Masturbation and female pleasure? AN ABOMINATION. Did that ever stop me? No. (Sorry, Mum).
The Laugh of the Medusa placed significant emphasis on the cisgender female body and its processes: menstruation, pregnancy, lactation and clitoral pleasure. There are many - especially those familiar with my stance on the imperative nature of trans-inclusion and an intersectional understanding of womanhood - who might question why I love The Laugh Of The Medusa so much given that it does seem to espouse essentialist views.
In my view, Cixous knows her work is imperfect and intends it as a beginning of the discussion, not the end, admitting openly: 'since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the point of being discovered, they necessarily bear the mark of our time’.
The Laugh Of The Medusa is the beginning of an interrogation of the state of the world and its expectations of women. Although she does not delve into the depths of what that might look like for different women, she is radical in acknowledging even that the concepts of womanhood and femininity are far from rigidly defined and are in fact being defined and redefined by the world. Why not, argues Cixous, give the power to women to define themselves and to form their own self-narratives?
But, Cixous knows this herself and admits this openly: 'since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the point of being discovered, they necessarily bear the mark of our time’. The Laugh Of The Medusa is the beginning of an interrogation of the state of the world and its expectations of women. Although she does not delve into the depths of what that might look like for different women, she is radical in acknowledging even that the concepts of womanhood and femininity are far from rigidly defined and are in fact being defined and redefined by the world. Why not, argues Cixous, give the power to women to define themselves and to form their own self-narratives?
I was deeply uncomfortable with being a woman for a long, long time. I remember going to a podcast interview hosted by a good friend and the first question was ‘so, tell me about being non-binary’. I was taken aback, but could also understand how they got there given how tired I was of carrying the weight of expectation. I had never really questioned my gender, but I was tired of the way gendered expectations had historically always set me up to fail because as a lesbian, as an autistic woman and as someone who grew up as a tomboy, I always felt like I was doing womanhood wrong, that I was failing in some way.
Finding Cixous’ work and understanding that there are many ways to be a woman and that the label was for me to define helped me feel much more comfortable within my skin. I should emphasise, this is just my experience - I have many trans friends who relate to the above statements because they are trans. If anything, this shows to me the ways rigid definitions of gender and gender roles alike harm everyone.
I was fascinated to read Juliet Jacques’ essay écriture trans-féminine? exploring how Cixous' writing opened the floodgates for a range of writing which approached gender, not as an oppressive construct but as something to be (self) determined, played with and refined. Just as the experience of no one woman is the same, the experience of no trans person is the same (despite what current media might portray).
Jacques suggests that ‘to examine the ways in which being trans or non-binary complicates or changes a whole range of experiences means no longer excluding the reality of sex and sexuality from the picture; incorporating it into an expanded écriture trans may help us to overcome any fear of transphobic detractors, and take the creativity unleashed by Cixous, Stone and others into unprecedented place’. In short, the Laugh of the Medusa is a springboard, not a full stop.
Recently, I saw a copy of the entirety of Cixous’ work in translation in a charity shop on Camden High Street. For reasons I cannot fathom, I did not buy it. Perhaps I thought my days of infatuation with 20th-century feminist essayists were over, or maybe I had learned everything I needed already. As I sit here writing on a week where I have thought almost exclusively of whether my writing is any good or even important all the while mentally totting up calories consumed in my brain and listening to TERFs on the internet rage about the ‘wrong’ kind of woman, I am reminded of why her work is so important.