Ecriture Feminine (Women's Writing)

The term 'Ecriture Feminine' (Women's Writing) was coined by the French feminist critic Helene Cixous in her essay The Laugh of Medusa published in 1975. In the essay, she puts forward the emergence of a distinctive writing called 'feminine writing'. According to Cixous, this form of writing has its origin in the mother-child relationship before the child acquires male-centered verbal language. Drawing heavily from the psychoanalytical model developed by Jacques Lacan, she locates feminine writing in the pre-linguistic (the Imaginary Order) stage of human child. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, a child identifies with the mother in the Imaginary Order and it feels the lack (separation) of the mother as it learns the language which is phallocentric. Cixous posits that the child maintains its unconscious character in the pre-linguistic stage which helps it to abolish all repressions. In this stage, the child undermines and subvert the fixed significations and the logic and closure of phallocentric language. This results in opening a joyous free play of meanings.

In her definition of Women's Writing, Luce Irigaray, the Belgian born French feminist, refuses the monopoly and appropriation of writing into existing systems. She considers the fluidity and diversity of female sexuality as the basis of writing; hence writing opens multiple possibilities.

Julia Kristeva, Bulgarian French philosopher and feminist, introduces the concept of "chora" as the source of feminine writing. 'Chora' is a pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal unsystematic signification process centered on the mother which she calls 'semiotic' and it is repressed on the acquisition of the father controlled, syntactically ordered, logical language - the symbolic.