Power Quote
Power Quote: Hélène Cixous
This is how I would define a feminine textual body: as a female libidinal economy, a regime, energies, a system of spending not necessarily carved out by culture. A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there’s no closure, it doesn’t stop, and it’s this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to read. For we’ve learned to read books that basically pose the word “end.” But this one doesn’t finish, a feminine text goes on and on and at a certain moment the volume comes to an end but the writing continues and for the reader this means being thrust into the voice. These are texts that work on the beginning but not on the origin. The origin is a masculine myth: I always want to know where I come from. The question “Where do children come from?” is basically a masculine, much more than feminine, question. The quest for origins, illustrated by Oedipus, doesn’t haunt a feminine unconscious. Rather it’s the beginning, or beginnings, the manner of beginning, not promptly with the phallus in order to close with the phallus, but starting on all sides at once, that makes a feminine writing. A feminine text starts on all sides at once starts twenty times, thirty times, over.
–from “Castration or Decapitation?” trans. by Annette Kiihn, included in French Feminism Reader (pg. 287)
“startling on all sides at once” is good, but Cixous writes “starting”.
“My books are thus like life and history, heterogenous chapters in a
single vast book whose ending I will never know”
I feel a bit dim for having to ask this [apparently masculine] question, but who decided the genders of texts and why was the distinction made?
a wreath, a circle, feminine, a line, masculine
seems like you’re trying to respond to my question, but since you didn’t approach the pertinent “why” and failed to hit the “reply” button, I’m not entirely sure
one time this feminine text came so hard it lost consciousness and then didn’t pick up again for like 30 pages
Okay: “feminine” is ‘beginning’ and ‘unending’ and “masculine” is ‘origin’ and ‘closure’, in respective pairs.
Is Cixous discovering definitions so that her ‘side’ wins the Battle to be Cool? Is this taxonomic triumph a “feminine” or a “masculine” thing to achieve?
alex, “female/male” is a biological determination (and determinism) – and a compellingly, eh, empirical one at that – , while “feminine/masculine” is a culturally determined polarity that each person shuttles between in, I guess, 1000 ways. One can’t (yet) choose one’s 23rd chromosomal pair, but one can ‘choose’ to be “feminine” or “masculine” in some particular way, and Cixous is trying to get at what that choice means, how it plays out, in a cultural forms like narrative, myth, and theater. As I understand categorizing this kind of analysis – probably a naughtily “masculine” thing to think – , it’s a straightforwardly Nietzschean way to think about sex and gender.
Thanks for your explanation above and for this, which is actually more along the lines of what I’m trying to uncover (I’ve read enough social/cultural theory to know the distinctions, which I should have written into my question). My problem is who decided one was masculine and one was feminine? Like, someone was pissed at one thing and said, “shit, kid, I’m gonna do the opposite and claim that for my side!” In that sense the reasons for making claims for one or the other boil down to arbitrary personal desires and trying to win the battle to be cool. (I honestly love a lot of the “open texts” that I’ve read, I just don’t understand the drive to gender them and make them more polarized, when we could feasibly do the opposite and make gender resemble the flux that it is.)
Is it literally as simple as deriving the cultural polarity from the biological? A penis is line-shaped and the vaginal opening is roughly circular?
To the best of my comprehension on the issue, masculine is masculine because it’s a cultural development which finds its epicenter in the male portion of the species, and feminine is feminine because it’s a cultural development which finds its epicenter in the female portion of the species. It’s important, through all the academic hijinks of the field, to remember that these things are based in a reality much older than, and based outside of, social theory. Nobody ‘invented’ masculinity and femininity, or ‘decided’ what was masculine and feminine. When people talk about it (either as institutional authorities, as in this instance, or lay speculators) you have to assess which ones have ulterior agendas to their speculations, and which ones are honestly attempting to understand the developments–and in my experience the field suffers from its youth, being either underdeveloped or self-absorbed–but it’s important not to lose sight of the root of the struggle to comprehend these things which are a part of us just because it can become petty and very reductive.
feminine is regenerative/open/acknowledging, masculine is solution-oriented/martial/linear, there are degrees of both in every person and you need both to survive and thrive, so it’s not a gender thing, although I finally understand all my wives and girlfriends but can’t un-ring a bell
feminine is regenerative/open/acknowledging, masculine is solution-oriented/martial/linear, there are degrees of both in every person and you need both to survive and thrive, so it’s not a gender thing, although I finally understand all my wives and girlfriends but can’t un-ring a bell
Thanks for your reply. I found myself especially irritated by that Cixous quote, I think, because it comes across as so self-absorbed and self-important, or alternately, as if I’m being excluded from some club whose goals I find myself in sympathy.
Maybe I’m also misunderstanding the above quote because it’s out of context and seems like an attack. What’s wrong with searching for origins? The problem with circles is that they keep out things that weren’t already within their bounds. An interplay of these masculine and feminine characteristics seems, ultimately, more fruitful. But, like I said, perhaps that’s what I’m missing from the context of that quote.
Thanks for your reply. I found myself especially irritated by that Cixous quote, I think, because it comes across as so self-absorbed and self-important, or alternately, as if I’m being excluded from some club whose goals I find myself in sympathy.
Maybe I’m also misunderstanding the above quote because it’s out of context and seems like an attack. What’s wrong with searching for origins? The problem with circles is that they keep out things that weren’t already within their bounds. An interplay of these masculine and feminine characteristics seems, ultimately, more fruitful. But, like I said, perhaps that’s what I’m missing from the context of that quote.
Well, I was very deliberately not trying to interpret the quote itself. I think I agree with much of its speculations about femininity, from my own personal discoveries, and I don’t think the people who’ve expressed their reservations about the quote (from what I can tell including yourself) are really all that out of joint with the meat of what she’s saying–it’s mostly tone and stance that’s being responded to (in a thread full of what seem to be only male responses, which is no doubt telling of something).
A lot could be said to try and explicate that tone and stance–we could talk about the attitudes of different generations of the feminist movement, the differences between English-speaking and Francophone feminism, the individual differences between her and these two cultural components she’s a part of–but unfortunately were I to attempt to do so I would be out of my depth (I thought that if deadgod were to reply he’d handle what of it he attempted better than me, anyway). What I heard in your post that moved to respond was mostly the tone of weariness with the whole matter: a weariness that’s understandable but in many people who feel it doesn’t get redirected into thinking differently about it, but a ‘just done with this’ happens at some point in a lot of people. As much as the narrow thinking, I think this weariness holds our understanding back.
Helene Cixous is a genius, and none of you have anything insightful to say about this wondrous quote. It’s philosophy, bitches, something that you’re all too hard-nosed for. Read some Cixous or some Eileen Myles and leave your rigid masculinist preconceptions at the door. Or don’t and keep missing it.
Sounds like sumbody’s got some rigid anti-masculinist premisconceptions unleft at the door!
I suspect this post is less anti-masculine than it is anti-male. It shouldn’t surprise anybody to witness a group of men fumble around trying to say anything insightful about a quote from a book titled – Castration or Decapitation?
I invite the commenter to unpack this for the hard-nosed and rigid bitches we no doubt are, and the “You’ll never get it, and never will” routine is irresponsible, doesn’t cut it, and only shuts the door where we will leave our preconceptions.
the above is a Reply to you (that works out kind of nicely, to you)
I hesitate to try to respond in a sincere way, because the Internet in general and HTMLGiant in particular are not welcoming spaces to have a genuine discussion about feminism, gender, and writing. I’ve read long comment threads on here before, and I’m not, I’ll admit, too interested in participating in the inanity and name-calling that occurs subsequently.
I read the Cixous quote by Higgins with pleasure, as a person with a deep interest in French feminism, creative writing, and ecriture feminine, and then read the majority of the following comments with dismay, in part because I sensed that men were responding and not getting it and because that’s tiring.
I disagree fully with you, Guestagain, when you say that it’s not a “gender” thing, because it precisely is a gender thing. It’s about women, and writing as women, BUT ONLY in the sense that it is about being other, and writing as an other. And Alex Crowley is on two wrong feet when he asks if it’s because “a penis is like a line and a vagina is like a circle.” The problem most people run into when they read French feminism is that they think the feminism people like Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous espouse is solely about women, and that women will all write the same way, or have something in common because they have vaginas (and are women). In “Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous says, “there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman… you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogenous, classifiable into codes..any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women’s imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing.”
The other really massive problem with most of the commenters is that they read the quote like Cixous has set masculine texts and feminine texts in strict opposition to each other, that they’re in a one-to-one ratio, that they somehow match and parallel each other. This isn’t how the French feminist position on the gender of human beings or the “gender” of texts really works. If I can make up some sort of stupid analogy, I’d say it’s something like: masculine and feminine aren’t two sides of the same coin; masculine is both sides of the coin and the feminine is part of some different economy altogether.
Cixous doesn’t think that all women write feminine texts, and she doesn’t think that men can’t write feminine texts. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” she says the only French writers who have come close to feminine writing in the twentieth century are Colette, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Genet.
I find it personally offensive that Alex Crowley thinks that Cixous is “self-absorbed.” What does he think the ratio of men to women writing, commenting, and getting reviewed on HTMLGiant is? But I really shouldn’t be surprised that a woman writing gets called self-absorbed, that’s just indicative of the way we silence and penalize women’s speaking and writing in general.
I hesitate to try to respond in a sincere way, because the Internet in general and HTMLGiant in particular are not welcoming spaces to have a genuine discussion about feminism, gender, and writing. I’ve read long comment threads on here before, and I’m not, I’ll admit, too interested in participating in the inanity and name-calling that occurs subsequently.
I read the Cixous quote by Higgins with pleasure, as a person with a deep interest in French feminism, creative writing, and ecriture feminine, and then read the majority of the following comments with dismay, in part because I sensed that men were responding and not getting it and because that’s tiring.
I disagree fully with you, Guestagain, when you say that it’s not a “gender” thing, because it precisely is a gender thing. It’s about women, and writing as women, BUT ONLY in the sense that it is about being other, and writing as an other. And Alex Crowley is on two wrong feet when he asks if it’s because “a penis is like a line and a vagina is like a circle.” The problem most people run into when they read French feminism is that they think the feminism people like Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous espouse is solely about women, and that women will all write the same way, or have something in common because they have vaginas (and are women). In “Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous says, “there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman… you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogenous, classifiable into codes..any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women’s imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing.”
The other really massive problem with most of the commenters is that they read the quote like Cixous has set masculine texts and feminine texts in strict opposition to each other, that they’re in a one-to-one ratio, that they somehow match and parallel each other. This isn’t how the French feminist position on the gender of human beings or the “gender” of texts really works. If I can make up some sort of stupid analogy, I’d say it’s something like: masculine and feminine aren’t two sides of the same coin; masculine is both sides of the coin and the feminine is part of some different economy altogether.
Cixous doesn’t think that all women write feminine texts, and she doesn’t think that men can’t write feminine texts. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” she says the only French writers who have come close to feminine writing in the twentieth century are Colette, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Genet.
I find it personally offensive that Alex Crowley thinks that Cixous is “self-absorbed.” What does he think the ratio of men to women writing, commenting, and getting reviewed on HTMLGiant is? But I really shouldn’t be surprised that a woman writing gets called self-absorbed, that’s just indicative of the way we silence and penalize women’s speaking and writing in general.
“I hesitate to try to respond in a sincere way, because the Internet in general and HTMLGiant in particular are not welcoming spaces to have a genuine discussion about feminism, gender, and writing. I’ve read long comment threads on here before, and I’m not, I’ll admit, too interested in participating in the inanity and name-calling that occurs subsequently. ”
Calling everyone bitches and hard-nosed is probably not the best way to approach any comment thread, especially one on a site you say you already find unwelcoming to this type of discussion, and it’s certainly not the best way to avoid participating in inanity and name-calling, I think.
I just didn’t expect to be able to say anything productive no matter how I situated my remarks. I responded thoughtfully to Guestagain because I was trying to engage with that particular comment.
This is excellent, very educational, and you need elephant skin to discuss anything on the internet. The source of my comments are a kind of synapse disconnect in my brain coding where I equate male/female to gender and while I do acknowledge gender issues in culture, politics, and particularly business, I see both masculine and feminine “traits” blended in everyone so I’m always sorting out these feminine and masculine tokens intellectually. I appreciate the recent shift to characterize the field as Women’s Studies, instead of feminism, which has the unfortunate (but I think somewhat earned) militant overtone, much in the same way that liberalism is now characterized as progressivism, it’s a syntactical difference that I think is important, words stub out our cognitive framework. Thanks for your time.
Just as a follow-up, at my school the program I’m getting a minor in is called “gender studies,” and not even just “women’s studies.” The emphasis, I think, being on that everyone has a gender and everyone benefits from a critical study of how our gender (and our sex) inflect and shape the world.
you, you say that you’re not “interested in” the “inanity and name-calling” prevalent on “the Internet in general and HTMLGiant in particular”. Here’s your entry onto this thread:
Well, let me respond sincerely and genuinely to the substance of your defense of (this fragment of) Cixous.
The quotation in the blogicle plainly sets “the feminine textual body” as “always endless” and having no “closure”. The quotation plainly sets “feminine text” as “work[ing] on the beginning but not on the origin”, which concern with origins is generative of “masculine myth”. These distinctions between “feminine” and “masculine” aren’t smuggled by any reader into the text.
Now, you say that this presentation doesn’t put “feminine” and “masculine” “in strict opposition to each other”, nor are they “parallel”, but rather, that “masculine” is itself the ‘opposition’ of two sides of a coin (say) and “feminine” is “different” from such opposition “altogether”. I think this characterization of the text simply flies in the face of the text.
I also think that posing one “economy” as different from, but not opposed to, another, in plainly gendered terms (“feminine”, “masculine”), is a sophistry. Cixous’s distinction between “feminine” and “masculine” is a “strict opposition”, in her senses that “endless [textual body]” does not have “closure” and “beginning” is not “origin”. In both cases, the former is not only not the latter, but is characterized as not being the latter.
Likewise, the quotation in the blogicle refers, as distinct from ‘the masculine question of origin’, to “the manner of beginning, not promptly with the phallus in order to close with the phallus, but starting on all sides at once”. Alex’s translation – which might be merely an accurate reduction – to the analogy ‘line : circle :: phallus : vagina’ is at least a sturdily two-footed question for the text, no?
you, I think you’ve tried to inoculate your comments against the same vigorous position-taking they partake of by equating a “genuine discussion about feminism, gender, and writing” with a discussion where Cixous’s view might be refined or qualified, but never directly contradicted. I think you can see that she can be contradicted without personal offense either to her or to ‘you’.
Your writing is actually really obtuse and difficult for me to understand. A phallus is not a penis. The whole thing that I was saying was that it’s NOT about biology. A penis is biological whereas a phallus is not a kind of genital attached to anyone’s body, at least as far as I know.
Your writing is actually really obtuse and difficult for me to understand. A phallus is not a penis. The whole thing that I was saying was that it’s NOT about biology. A penis is biological whereas a phallus is not a kind of genital attached to anyone’s body, at least as far as I know.
Regarding your first point: I maintain that Cixous is not setting up, at least in this quote, what a masculine textual body would be. A feminine text asking different questions than being obsessed with a “masculine myth” does not create two clearly distinct kinds of texts. Just because she specifies one particular dimension that feminine writing might not participate in (namely, the search for the origin) does not mean that she’s defining masculine and feminine texts in and of themselves.
In regard to your worry that I’m guilty of making a sophistry, I’ll just say that I was trying to create an analogy to make this simpler and you attacking it doesn’t make sense, as I didn’t mean it literally. Maybe I’ll cede my point and say that it’s not possible for the economies to be different without them being in opposition to each other, and then my point will STILL remain that I’m trying to insist that Cixous just doesn’t want “masculine” and “feminine” to be in a neat one-to-one ratio (you can see this in a lot of Cixous’s work that tries to subvert binaries in some complicated ways). Feminine is not simply the opposite or inverse of masculine, and that, I believe, is part of what this quote about a “feminine text” means.
Well, Cixous isn’t describing “masculine” in its entirety, just making clear what’s Other about “masculine” (relative to its “feminine” Other). We disagree; in saying “always endless [with] no closure” and “work on the beginning but not on the origin”, Cixous is referring to (I agree: not “creating”) “two distinct kinds of texts”. Sure, it’s not a matter of “defining masculine and feminine texts in and of themselves”, but it’s definitely – in my view – a matter of distinguishing each as the (or an) Other of the other. That the distinction – the distinct difference, the being different ‘in this way’ – is comparative and phenomenal, and therefore says nothing clear about the essence of “feminine” or “masculine”, doesn’t dismiss or waive the empirical compulsion of that distinction.
I don’t say or think that the analogy itself is sophistical. I think it’s an effective analogy – thinking by way of analogy is rational to me, and I don’t take ‘similar’ to mean ‘same’. Different economies aren’t necessarily opposed to each other – a barter economy is simply different from a money economy. (Of course, there is opposition when one community mingles – violently or not – with another.) But, with Cixous, we don’t have “economies” out of contact with each other; we have “masculine” and “feminine”, which are, as “economies”, distinct in terms of each other. Even if no essential rivalry is posited, what Cixous posits, here, is “endless”/”closure” and “beginning”/”origin” – in a word, op-position.
I think what you’re suggesting, in terms of “subvert[ing] binaries”, is a radical alterity – other so as to be ‘other than an Other’ – which I think is sophistical. For me, this radical alterity is like an Appeal to Ineffability, in that it’s a gesture in language to what’s beyond language (which is reasonable) in terms that can’t even be argued with, because the referent is extralinguistic (which is, to me, a trick).
A genuine subversion of binary libidinality might be an assertion of equiprimordiality, of mutual entailment of “feminine” and “masculine”. Maybe Cixous makes this case – but not here.
A “phallus” is, indeed, a ‘penis’ or a ‘representation of a penis’. (All penises are phalluses; all phalluses are not fleshy organs.) If one subtracts the penis from the phallus – the biology from the cultural expression – , it’s not that cultural expression any more.
Is the way I’m communicating more “obtuse and difficult” than that of Cixous? I think you’re trying to silence the messenger with that characterization.
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