Le Rire de la Méduse / The Laugh of the Medusa (1975) - Hélène Cixous
Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen
"I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into her own movement.
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Antici-pation is imperative."
Read the rest of Cixous's essay The Laugh of the Medusa here...
See also Cixous' essay Aller à la mer / Going to the Sea (1977)
Trans. Barbara Kerslake
"How, as women, can we go to the theatre without lending our complicity to the sadism directed against women, or being asked to assume, in the patriarchal family structure that the theatre reproduces ad infinitum, the position of victim?"
Read the rest of Cixous's essay Aller à la mer here...
Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen
"I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into her own movement.
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Antici-pation is imperative."
Read the rest of Cixous's essay The Laugh of the Medusa here...
See also Cixous' essay Aller à la mer / Going to the Sea (1977)
Trans. Barbara Kerslake
"How, as women, can we go to the theatre without lending our complicity to the sadism directed against women, or being asked to assume, in the patriarchal family structure that the theatre reproduces ad infinitum, the position of victim?"
Read the rest of Cixous's essay Aller à la mer here...
