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In discussing who might exist in the position of outlaw, Cixous brings up (p. 314) the question of bisexuality. Again, she starts from Freud's idea that all humans are fundamentally bisexual, and that the Oedipal trajectory which steers both boys and girls into heterosexuality is an unfortunate requirement of culture. For Cixous, "culture" is always a phallogocentric order; the entry into the Symbolic requires the division between male and female, feminine and masculine, which subordinates and represses the feminine. But by erasing/deconstructing the slash between masculine and feminine, Cixous is not arguing for Freud's old idea of bisexuality. Rather, she wants a new bisexuality, the "other bisexuality," which is the "nonexclusion either of the difference or of one sex"--a refusal of self/other as a structuring dichotomy. In essence, rather than scotch-taping masculine and feminine together, Cixous' bisexuality would dissolve the distinctions, so that sexuality would be from any body, any site, at any time.

Without the dichotomy of self/other, all other dichotomies would start to fall apart, Cixous says: her other bisexuality would thus become a deconstructive force to erase the slashes in all structuring binary oppositions. When this occurs, the Western cultural representations of female sexuality--the myths associated with womanhood--will also fall apart. Cixous focuses in particular (p. 315) on the myth of the Medusa, the woman with snakes for hair, whose look will turn men into stone, and on the myth of woman as black hole, as abyss. The idea of woman as abyss or hole is pretty easy to understand; in Freudian terms, a woman lacks a penis, and instead has this scary hole in which the penis disappears (and might not come back). Freud reads the Medusa as part of the fear of castration, the woman whose hair is writhing penises; she's scary, not because she's got too few penises, but because she has too many. Cixous says those are the fears that scare men into being complicit in upholding the phallogocentric order: they're scared of losing their one penis when they see women as having either no penis or too many penises. If women could show men their true sexual pleasures, their real bodies--by writing them in non-representational form--Cixous says, men would understand that female bodies, female sexuality, is not about penises (too few or too many) at all. That's why she says we have to show them "our sexts"--another new word, the combination of sex and texts, the idea of female sexuality as a new form of writing.

Cixous then moves on to talk about the idea of hysterics as prior examples of women who write "sexts," who write their bodies as texts of l'ecriture feminine. Again, she's following Freud, whose earliest works were on hysteria, and focused on female hysterics. The idea of hysteria is that a body produces a symptom, such as the paralysis of a limb, which represents a repressed idea; the body thus "speaks" what the conscious mind cannot say, and the unconscious thoughts are written out by the body itself. L'ecriture feminine has a lot in common with hysterics, as you can see, in the idea of the direct connections between the unconscious and the body as a mode of "writing".

Cixous concludes the essay (starting on p. 318) by offering a critique of the Freudian nuclear family, the mom-dad-child formation, which she sees as generating the ideas of castration (Penisneid, in German) and lack which form the basis for ideas of the feminine in both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She wants to break up these "old circuits" so that the family formations which uphold the phallogocentric Symbolic won't be recreated every time a child is born; she argues that this family system is just as limiting and oppressive to men as to women, and that it needs to be "demater-paternalized."

Then she discusses other ways to figure pregnancy, arguing that, like all functions of the female body, pregnancy needs to be written, in "l'ecriture feminine." When pregnancy is written, and the female body figured in language as the source of life, rather than the penis, birth can be figured as something other than as separation, or as lack.

She ends with the idea of formulating desire as a desire for everything, not for something lacking or absent, as in the Lacanian Symbolic; such a new desire would strip the penis of its significance as the signifier of lack or of fulfillment of lack, and would free people to see each other as different beings, each of whom are whole, and who are not complementary. These beings, not defined by difference, absence, or even by gender, would begin to form a new kind of love, a love which she describes on 319-320, in the paragraph beginning "Other love . . . . "

This essay was written by Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and remains her property.

Last revision: November 24, 1997.