French Feminism

Hélène Cixous &

 Poststructuralist Feminist Theory

Born in 1937 in Oran, Algeria, Hélène Cixous a French feminist, play-writer, professor, philosopher, and one of the well-known founders of poststructuralist feminist theory. She has published numerous essays, playwrights, novels, poems and literary criticism. Her academic works concern subjects of feminism, the human body, history, death and theatre.

Hélène was the first child to Eve, who was a refugee from Osnabrück in Nazi Germany and served as a midwife. Her father, Georges, was a physician whose family came to Algeria through the Spanish and Moroccan trade routes. In her writing “The World of Dreams,” Hélène Cixous attributes her work regarding nationality and otherness to her upbringing: “My own writing was born in Algeria out of a lost country of the dead father and the foreign mother.” In fact, Hélène states, “[I] never thought I was at home [in Algeria], nor that Algeria was my country, nor that I was French.” Instead, her childhood experiences as an Algerian Jew made her realize that the logic of nationality was usually associated with colonialism or antisemitism.

During the early years of her education in Algeria, Hélène thought of herself and her family as a nationality of “other.” She said, “How could I be from a France that colonized an Algerian country when I knew that we ourselves, German Czechoslovak Hungarian Jews, were other Arabs?” Cixous continues to grapple with her sense of foreignness throughout her education in Algeria, and into her studies in Paris. Due to the restricted quota for Jews in Algerian schools, Hélène was actually the only Jew in her class, and even in higher education she was one of the few females in an entirely male school. As a result, Cixous became increasingly aware of the mechanisms of exclusion and interdiction based on cultural and sexual differences, and their specific interactions with nationality. 

In 1975 Cixous publishes one of her most prominent texts on in feminist writing titled, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in the newly founded American feminist journal Signs. In this writing, Cixous introduces her controversial idea of an insurgent, feminine-defined writing practice, which addresses and analyzes the dominant patriarchal system. In this system, she says, women are systematically deprived of their own cultural, psychic and sexual goods, while other forms of oppression based on, say, ethnicity, class, or race, thrive on women’s expropriation. Cixous further discusses how women have been repressed through their bodies all throughout history. She suggests that if women are forced to remain in their bodies as a result of male repression then they can do one of two things: remain trapped inside our bodies, thereby perpetuating the passivity women have been a party to throughout history, or use the female body as a medium of communication, a tool through which women can speak.

As a result of her this novel and her other feminist writings, Hélène Cixous is considered one of the mothers of poststructuralist feminist theory, which is a branch of feminism that engages with insights from poststructuralist thought. Poststructural feminism emphasizes “the contingent and discursive nature of all identities,” and in particular the social construction of gendered subjectivities. An important contribution of this branch was to establish that there is no universal single category of "woman" or “man” and to identify the intersectionality of sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, nationality, and more. Today, Cixous is a professor of English Literature at University of Paris VIII and chairs the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines which she founded in 1974.