authorship: feminist perspectives

Feminist Perspectives CCR 747 ::: S13

Sunday, February 24, 13

Hélène Cixous


l’ecriture féminine


Hélène Cixous Luce IrigarayJulia KristevaMonique WittigChantal ChawafCatherine Clément


How does this speak to authorship and ownership?


Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man, not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don’t like the true texts of women--female-sexed texts. That kind scares them. (877)


maternal body as site of authorship


authorship as connected to bodily fluids


cultural myths of authorship as gendered


• all writing, to the extent that it materializes, is feminine

• or, inversely--but it comes to the same thing--that the act of writing is equivalent to masculine masturbation (and so the women who writes cuts herself out a paper penis)

• or that writing is bisexual, hence neuter, which again so does away with differentiation. (883)


Flying is woman’s gesture--flying in language and making it fly. We have all learned the art of flying and its numerous techniques; for centuries we’ve been able to possess anything only by flying: we’ve lived in flight, stealing away, finding, when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers...

They go by, fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down. (887)


Write! and your self-seeking text will know itself better than flesh and blood, rising, insurrectionary dough kneading itself, with sonorous, perfumed ingredients, a lively combination of flying colors, leaves, and rivers plunging into the sea we feed. (889)


vitality of exchange


... To admit that writing is precisely working (in) the in between, inspecting the process of the same and of the other without which nothing can live, undoing the work of death--to admit this is first to want the two, as well as both, the ensemble of the one and the other, not fixed in sequences of struggle and expulsion or some other form of death but infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another. A process of different subjects knowing one another and beginning one another anew only from the living boundaries of the other: a multiple and inexhaustible course with millions of encounters and transformations of the same into the other and into the in-between, from which woman takes her forms ... (883, emphasis mine)


Besides, isn’t it evident that the penis gets around in my texts, that I give it a place and appeal? Of course I do. I want all. I want all of me with all of him. Why should I deprive myself of a part of us? I want all of us. ... But I do desire the other for the other, whole and entire, male or female; because living means wanting everything that is, everything that lives, and wanting it alive. Castration? Let others toy with it. What’s a desire originating from a lack? A pretty meager desire. (891)


The new love dares for the other, wants the other, makes dizzying, precipitous flights between knowledge and invention. The woman arriving over and over again does not stand still; she’s everywhere, she exchanges, she is the desire-that-gives. (893)


white ink


Andrea Lunsford


What would a feminist approach to textual ownership look like?


...for a (short) time it seemed to us possible that some kind of subtle but powerful rebalancing act might be possible: we would simply work with others to demonstrate the degree to which all discourse is produced socially, and growing recognition of this fact would break the hierarchical binary so firmly entrenched: solitary, original authorship = powerful, privileged, and good; collaborative, shared authorship = “uncreative,” transgressive, and bad, very nearly a “crime” of writing. (530)


Feminism and - death of the author- property (531)


3 ways of engagement(533-35)


authority situated in connections (539)


authorship: feminist perspectives

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