Postmodern Feminism and the Critique of Universal Subjects

A distinctive strand of French feminist theory associated with the label "écriture féminine" ("feminine writing") emerged in the mid-1970s from theorists closely engaged with, and critical of, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction. Hélène Cixous's 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" ("Le Rire de la Méduse") called on women to write from and through the specificity of the female body, against a Western philosophical and literary tradition Cixous characterized as structured by binary oppositions — active/passive, culture/nature, head/heart — that consistently privileged the term coded as masculine. Luce Irigaray, in Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum de l'autre femme, 1974) — the book that led to her expulsion from Lacan's École Freudienne de Paris — and This Sex Which Is Not One (Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, 1977), argued that Western philosophy from Plato to Freud constructs "woman" only as a deficient mirror of a masculine subject taken as the unmarked norm, leaving female subjectivity and desire without any positive, autonomous articulation of its own.