Writing with Cixous, in Love

Abstract

Chapter 3 steps backwards and forwards in time through embodied memories of myself as a young girl, mother and woman encountering the work of French poststructuralist feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher and literary critic Hélène Cixous. The centrality of Cixous’ work to my own approach to writing-as-thinking-as-writing-as-woman through critical and embodied autoethnography is touched upon. Encountering Cixous’ 1976 piece “The laugh of the Medusa” features as a re/turning point to destroy the status quo of masculinist writing and give birth to myself as a newly-born feminist academic. In this chapter I aim to share the ways in which Cixous’ writing holds potential to be daring, dangerous and liberate my/your/our work from the shackles of conventional, colonial and capitalist patriarchy to become a kind and loving autoethnographic praxis.

When do we reach the hour when we say we have deceivedeveryone in our lives in order to keep what we call life going? I don’t know. We go to the School of the Dead to hear a little of what we are unable to say. This is why we need to the books that hurt us.

Cixous (1993, p. 53)