sardine -- pre 11/14 -- cixous

“Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me – the other that I am and am not, that I don’t know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live – that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who? -- a feminine one, a masculine one, some? – several, some unknown, which is indeed what gives me the desire to know and from which all life soars. This peopling gives neither rest nor security, always disturbs the relationship to ‘reality,’ produces an uncertainty that gets in the way of the subject’s socialization. It is distressing, it wears you out; and for men this permeability, this nonexclusion is a threat, something intolerable” (Cixous, 160).

I feel moved by this passage in Cixous’ manifesto. It describes the alienation of subject identity women feel without their voices, but it gives a direction to hope for more. Writing down the barriers in the phallologocentric society is a means of personal escape and escape for humanity. It is not only women that are entrapped in the world of binary opposition and fear of castration. Men are also entrapped in “phallocentric narcissism.” Men are obedient to socially defined traditions of masculinity – profit, power, virility, money, and pleasure (Cixous, 161). For Cixous, writing enables the woman to write through the body, to become for than the prescribed feminine, to facilitate bisexuality in creation.

Women trying to speak in a a phallologocentric environment is painful, angering, resented. We are quiet because we are advised to “shut up.” We blunder in our high pitched need to express our body / emotions / thoughts. We are labeled hysterics, anxious mothers, bitches, sluts, ugly, or worst of all the final betrayal, dykes.

Behave women! We are trained to be obedient. We do not raise our hands in class because we are not called upon. We fall silent while our fathers and later husbands and sons speak because we are ignored. When we become angry and scream our futility and wretchedness, we embarrass the man in the man’s confine, and women note by example how they should not behave.

Cixous gives hope through writing to develop into more than just the mother / daughter / sister / wife. To create an identity more fluid, and unfixed. To free the subjective-identity, the self, the unconscious, the woman, the man, the culture.