Helene Cixous

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.
-- Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"

Cixous was born in Oran, Algeria in 1937, which was a colony of France, and was raised in a German-Jewish household. She received her agregation in English in 1959 and her Docteur en lettres in 1968. Cixous has taught at many different universities throughout France including the University of Bordeaux (1962), the Sorbonne (1965-67), and Nanterre (1967).

In the 1970's Cixous became involved in exploring the relationship between sexuality and writing, the same kinds of work being done by theorists like Kristeva, Barthes, Derrida, and Irigaray (Shiach). In this time period she composed such influential works as "Sortie," "The Laugh of the Medusa," and "Coming to Writing."

Since the authoring of these texts in the seventies, Cixous has become even more mysterious and complex, but has somewhat lessened her radical ideology for a more inclusive exploration of collective identities. She is currently an English literature professor at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes where she has established a center for women's studies and is a co-founder of the structuralist journal Poetique.

What theorists like Cixous are trying to do is answer the questions that many of us may have personally struggled with throughout our studies in rhetoric and perhaps even our studies this summer. Why have women's voices been so historically absent in a rich tradition of rhetoric that spans over two thousand years? Is it simply a matter of women being forbidden the education that would allow them into the discourse community? or, is there actually a distinct woman's way of thinking, speaking, and interacting, a women's rhetoric if you will, that has made it difficult for women to communicate in these forums? These are the types of questions that Cixous is specifically interested in attempting to answer. (From "Introduction to Helene Cixous" Julie Gaskin"

And for your inspirational pleasure, a short quote from Cixous' Manifesto, "The Laugh of the Medusa" , encouraging women to Write, Write, Write!!

¡¡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. Women must put herself into the text -- as into the world and into history -- by her own movement.

¡¡The future must lo nonger 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. Anticipation is imperative.

¡¡I write this as a woman, towards women. When I say 'woman', I'm speaking of woman in her inevitable striggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history. But first it must be said that in spite of the enormity of the repression that has kept them in the 'dark' -- that dark which people have been trying to make them accept as their attribute -- there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can't talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes -- any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.

¡¡It is time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her -- by loving her for getting by, for getting beyond the Old without delay, by going out ahead of what the new Woman will be, as an arrow quits the bow with a movement that gathers and separates the vibrations musically, in order to be more than her self.