Writing (Through) The Body

"The effort to define a feminist art, a major emphasis in contemporary feminist theory, begins with Virginia Woolf's assertion, in A Room of One's Own, that the common sentence of male-dominant literary tradition is "unsuited to a woman's use" and that, in the future, the woman writer's "book has somehow to be adapted to the body."  The French feminist critic, Helene Cixous, makes a contrapuntal extension of Woolf in "The Laugh of the Medusa": "Women must write through their bodies. . . .  They must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics."

"The question is: what does it mean to "write through the body?"  The body one is born with shapes one's identity, and patriarchy perpetuates a false dichotomy between body and mind, equating 'man' with 'mind' and 'woman' with 'body.'"

("Bisexuality in Helene Cixous, Virginia Woolf, and H.D.: An Aspect of L'ecriture Feminine," Jane Augustine)


"What is wild goes its own way, neither domesticated nor controlled.  Thus the phrase "the female wild zone" blazes images of female freedom and self-determination.  First used in feminist literary critical discourse by Elaine Showalter. . . . Showalter defines the female wild zone 'as the aspects of the female life-style which are outside of and unlike those of men' and as the source for creating genuinely female symbols and metaphors."

(The Witch's Garden" The Feminist Grotesque," Susan R. Bowers)