Quotes from Cixous

Why do ecriture femenine?

Woman must write herself: must write women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies

What is it?

There is such a thing as marked writing.

Why must it defy grammar?

Writing has been run by a a libidinal and cultural, typically masculine, economy

Do women currently write this way?

Female writers (...) whose workmanship is in no way different from male writing. Obscures women, reproduces the classic representations of women

Deconstructing and regendering language

Bisexual hence neuter vs Nonexclusion either of the difference or of one sex

Phallic symbolism

Man has been (...) reduced to a single idol with clay balls (...) and consumed (...) by a fear of being a woman!

Are women contained by symbolism

NO, their marginalisation gives them freedom. "Though masculine sexuality gravitates around the penis (...) woman does not bring about the same regionalisation"

Othering of women

They riveted us between two horrifying myths: the medusa and the abyss

How language can free women

If woman has always functioned "within" the discourse of man (...), it is time for her to dislocate this "within"

Voler

Voler is women's gesture: voler in language and making it [fly/steal]

Muting of woman's voice

Her words almost always fall upon the deaf male ear, which hear in language only that which speaks in the masculine

Role of men in ecriture femenine

It's up to [man] to decide where his masculinity and femininity are at

How does ecriture femenine relate to the body

This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, as in particular concerns masturbation

Castration anxiety

But isn't this fear convenient to them?

Poetic conventions

Such a woman a poet could only desire by breaking the codes that negate her

Othering of women as a continent

- the dark continent
- monuments to Lack