Abstract

Sustaining a healthy sense of self-identity is crucial for our individual and collective well-being. Following the emergence of feminism, the concept of ‘identity’ has been conjoined with ethics, politics, and representation. Feminist discourses have challenged the fundamental categories of male-centric thought, including those of subjectivity and identity-formation. Poststructuralist feminism has marked any attempt to form an identity in natural-eternal, oppositional, and/or hierarchical terms as phallogocentric, and thereby problematic. But concomitantly, the provisional, fractured, anti-humanist subject-in-process also seems inadequate as a sustainable subject-category, especially for women. The goal for contemporary feminist theory is, therefore, to explore a non-binary, non-phallogocentric (feminine) perspective. ‘Feminine’ in this context does not mean the antonym of ‘masculine’, but refers to a non-binary, non-hierarchical approach based on simultaneity and fluidity. It is simultaneously an onto-epistemological position and a politico-ethical stance, where the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ facilitate mutual (un)learning, cohabitation, and reconfiguration. The present paper discusses how French feminist thinker Hélène Cixous explores the poetics and politics of the feminine in her celebrated essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa”. The research methodology followed is that of qualitative analysis from a feminist theoretical perspective. Writing in an interdisciplinary and non-generic style, Cixous argues for a ‘feminine writing’ which subverts the repressions of a patriarchal culture. Cixous unites the feminine, the ‘feminist’ and the ‘female’ in the figure of the ‘New Woman’—a sexual-textual ‘self/s’ whose awareness of multiple belongings and ceaseless becoming allows ‘her’ to remain porous to the other. It is a subjectivity predicated not on ‘either/or’ but ‘both’ – embodied but plural, gender fluidic but resembling a woman’s sexual drives and pleasures (jouissance), coherent but polymorphous. Cixous thereby inaugurates an ethical subjectivity and a liberating self-expression, particularly for women.