"And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it" (Cixous 246).
I don't know about you fellow-bloggers, but I feel like I took something Thursday night and it felt really good.
Cixous writes as though she might burst, as though we all might burst, as though every woman is secretly or not so secretly bursting at the seams, aching to release our "unheard-of songs" on an unprepared world. Upon my accidental initiation into the world of feminism two years ago (thank you Mebbie), I remember feeling as though there was suddenly so much that urgently needed to be said and not enough time or words or forums in which to say it. The flood gates had been opened, but I had no idea where the water was going to go. Unfortunately, as time went by, I found no solution to the problem and thus, my insides remained flooded while the world at large remained impeccably dry.
Cixous urges women to write. That never seemed like enough to me, but perhaps it is a necessary first step. Rhodes speaks of the urgency of radical feminist textuality (both of the second wave and contemporarily) in a way that seems to mirror Cixous. We write because someone must! We write because we have to start somewhere! We write in order to take back our corner of the world, to rearticulate that corner as ourselves and thrust that corner into the spotlight, even if only for a moment. It seems endlessly simplistic, but to simply demand the recognition of one’s existence is really powerful.
So cyber world, I AM A FEMINIST AND I AM HERE!
Cixous, Helene. 1981. "The Laugh of the Medusa". In New French Feminisms, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 245-264. New York: Schocken Books.
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This week I found your post very interesting! It made me think about writing and language in accordance with Mary Daly and Kipnis. Mary Daly speaks of not being able to truly communicate using the language of the patriarchs but I though we could use Kipnis' theory of taking something that is given to us (in this case language) and use it out of the context in which it is given to us (to support capitalism and patriarchy) and use it for our own devices. So we can take a typically patriarchal language and use it in a way which is antagonistic to further our cause. So write on feminist propagator, write on.
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