The Laugh Of The Medusa Cultural Studies Essay

The express feelings Of The Medusa Cultural Studies EssayThe main reason for choosing the above critics and their respective(prenominal) essays is that at heart feminist theories, Cixous often comes to be associated with French feminist psychoanalytical theorists like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. In addition both critical essays ar interested with referenceship the frame.By the early eighties, feminists had advanced to a confrontational approach on young-begetting(prenominal) supremacy, advocating a complete overthrow of the biased ( anthropoid) statute of literature. French feminists, like Helene Cixous and Luce Irigary claimed that women should have a greater knowingness of their bodies when report, a thing which would create a more h cardinalst and appropriate musical mode of openness, fragmentation and non-linearity. Both feminist critics seem to have similar agendas admixture radical analysis with La push asideian and Freudian theory in order to rede patriarch al hegemony in the connected real, symbolic and imaginary orders. Hence their unpredictable prose, a reaction against and within a symbolic order complicit in domination.Cixous first indication of the essay The gag of the Medusa reveals like an fervent c all told to action and a feminist manifesto in which women atomic bout 18 urged to deliver themselves out of the world men constructed for women. Using the first person, plural and imperative statements, Cixous urges women to put themselves the unthinkable/unthought into words (Putnam Tong, 1998). She pledges for the contemplateion of a new insurgent makeup that will allow women to deconstruct the chat that regulates the phallocentric system. Thitherfore the purpose of the essay under analysis is to break up and destroy a type of men writing which has functioned as an promoter of patriarchal expression and which has become a locus where the repression of women has been for too extensive perpetuated.In the same line of thought, Irigary pledges in her essay This Sex Which Is non One (1977) for promoting womens language which is expectationed as far richer than mens language in that it does not follow only one th skim. It is advanced the idea that womens writing is unresolved of constantly creating the other gist (Irigary 204) generating an incomprehensible multiplicity of meanings which are otiose to remain immobilized, and consequently impossible to be included into patterns of trip outuality and demeanour imposed by the dominant patriarchal cultural and social norms. makeup and language become the main concepts of the essays under analysis and the centers roughly which all the other spirits like powder-puff/masculine sexuality, identity, ideologies and violence revolve. The concept of writing, to the highest degree often hereafter referred to as criture female is perceive as one important transformational tool if one is concerned with changing the social, cultural and government al masculine economy. It is impardonable, as Cixous puts it that there has not yet been any writing that inscribes feminity (Cixous 2042). Assuming that language is not a neutral medium it follows that writing is diagnosed in a discourse of relations social, semi governmental, 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) exit in discourse and give a grossly exaggerated view of the sexual opposition truly implicit in(p) to language. Sexual opposition has ever been inclusive to writing and is thus incriminated, this be one reason for women neer having the possibility to speak as writing has al slipway favored men, it worked for mans addition to the point of reducing writing to his laws (Cixous 2050).Irigarys critical vision is therefore in agreement with Cixous ideas in that both point in negative harm to w omens underdeveloped chassis which stems from their submission 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 needful backed by the critical force of feminist tradition. hence the wear out from the phallocentric tradition is indispensable as a authority of escape for women. corresponding male sexuality, masculine writing, which Cixous ordinarily termed phallogocentric writing, is besides ultimately boring and what is more stamped with the official seal of social approval, masculine writing is too leaden down to move or change. Womens writing expressed a uncomparable female consciousness, which was more discursive and conjunctive than the male one. Such consciousness was completely different, and had been unfavorably treat ed. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex studied the ways 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 object 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 or so some mutations in human relations to destroy the sexual oppositions, as well as the distinction amid feminine/masculine writing (Cixous 2046). Such thread which aims at destroying the artificial power and cultural constructs is in any case favored by Irigary who militates against the type of thinking based on sexism and oppositive political discourses the power of slaves (Irigary 205) would eventually collapse the binary thought inherent to horse opera tradition and would undo the logocentric political orientation and proclaim woman 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 playacting these roles by cultural representations that attempt to make them appear to be the indispensable prerogative of women.Furthermore, within the context of mass media, men and women have been be in conformity with the cultural stereotypes that serve to reproduce traditional sex roles. Thus men are usually shown as being dominant, active, battleful and authoritative, performing a variety of important and varied roles that often requires professionalism, efficiency, tenability and strength to be carried out successfully. Women by contrast are usually shown 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 dispute 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 woman as Other she is the incidental, the inessentia l as opposed to him, the Subject.Cixous voice acquires vehement tonalities militating for womens inscribing in language in a new articulation of feminine drives, libido and sex insinuating into texts as a means of liberation from their repressed sexuality and as well 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 unnumbered and brisk 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 tree trunk from the text and ultimately rejecting female-sexed texts. As a result of this policy of exclusion, the square(a) 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 s elf-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 recognition point/man/phallus/symbol of power. Freud argued that this castration anxiety stems from a business organization of female genitalia, perceived by males at a subconscious take aim as the result of castration the female body understood subconsciously as lacking a phallus. Freud suggested that the mythical story of Medusa, in which pile turn to stone when they look at the snake-covered head of the Gorgon, could be read as addressing this psychoanalytic idolise.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 bring are inextricably linked. To free one means freedom for the other. To write from ones body is to flee reality, to escape hierarchical bonds and thereby come next 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 complex quantity and is a crucial concept since it is the source of womens writing and of breaking the Law of the arrest.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 (connec ted to the body, the mother, the breast). The Symbolic is associated with the Law of the arrive 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 voicelessness which is considered to be the true mistress of the Signifier, replacing the phallus as the inside Signifier from Lacans theory. Dora, the misunderstood hysterical woman, like Medusa, could be read as a mythological figure, examples of women who speak their body and threaten patriarchy. They have the depicted object to continue to interrogate and ultimately to deconstruct the Law of the Father. Doras words advent to us in twisted form rebel against the master/author of her story giving access to immense resources of the unconscious, de-censoring body and speech. The Laugh of the Medusa, therefore, revises the Freudian model which defines wom an as lack, once again alluding to the Law of the Father which is ruled by the fear of castration, 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 qualification 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 geographics of her pleasure which would be able to generate a connection between womens bodies and the making of meaning in a continuous play of configuration which would disrupt the symbolic former order of language.A similar bandstand 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, theref ore woman language is not a solid opaque block, but a flow which displays meaning into a multiplicity of signifiers without contours or frontiers woman is changeable and open, a mankind 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(prenominal) as the mothers voice/body/milk write in etiolated ink (Cixous 2045), therefore a desired think to the pre-Oedipal stage where binaries were absent. drafting on the resources of the Imaginary, mining i ts 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 paired 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 colossal debate amongst Cixous critics. Therefore the oppositions do not limit themselves to the traditional antagony m ale/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 bright torrents, a margin of excess eroticism and free-play not directly referable to the fixed hierarchies of masculinity. Hierarchical structures are shaken and subjective differences are advance 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 ski tow against their submissive and passive role to reach their full 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. distaff writing keeps alive the other, as love is not perceived in economic terms any longer.