French Feminism and Theatre: An Introduction

French Feminism and Theatre: An Introduction JEANNETTE LAILLOU SAVONA "Let the priests tremble, we're going to show them our sexts!" "You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing." Helene CixousI I want to outline briefly a conceptual framework for the two following articles: Helene Cixous's "Aller ala mer," and Josette Feral's "Writing and Displacement : Women in Theatre." Starting from these two texts, I shall also raise a few broader questions concerning a feminist criticism of drama. Cixous's and Feral's underlying problematic of a feminine poetics exemplifies a major theoretical trend in French feminist writings, a trend which is now gaining ground in North America.2 In their critiques of sexism, French intellectual feminists appear more radical than their American counterparts: they root their rejection of patriarchy in post-structuralist philosophy and its anti-humanist attacks on the "phallogocentrism"3 of our cultural tradition. Influenced by Jacques Derrida, they question the primacy of "language," "reason," "truth," "identity," or "the subject" (God, Man, the Father, or the Phallus), which male thinkers have always presented as universals while denying women any access to their conceptualization. The rationale behind this anti-humanist stance is that women find themselves at a cultural zero point, since they have been either minimized or depleted by all historical, anthropological or psychological theories of humankind and by all philosophical or linguistic systems of thought. Women's situation of intellectual vacuum is expressed by Cixous's metaphor ofthe "murder scene" on which all patriarchal cultures are founded, and by Feral's play on the word "Nothing" and her subsequent reference to women's initial bitter laughter on facing their own absence from all traditional means of expression. French Feminism and Theatre 541 In their fight for sexual equality, many feminists in general have chosen to play down "sexual difference," which they perceive as a sexist notion with pseudo-biological connotations.4 By contrast, many French feminists especially Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous - have reactivated the concept of difference, which they proudly assert as a central part of their dialectic. Deeply informed by Lacanian psycho-analytical research on the functioning of desire and sexuality in language,5 their works promote the expression ofthe repressed feminine unconscious and female body. They want to create a positive mythology of femininity through a "different" discourse and a "different" poetics which will subvert the dominant symbolic order.6 They consider their own gesture as political, because their purpose is to change men's and women's consciousnesses by remodelling their secret fantasies and dreams. Their celebration of woman as multiple sensuous body, triumphant giving mother, and infinite source of forms, images and sounds, and their assertion of a feminine language which, like female desire, can be fluid, moving, multiple, discontinuous and open, represent a conscious effort to produce a new imaginary order with matriarchal overtones. Their writings may sometimes recall the familiar saying "Vive la difference," the reason why they have been called "anti-feminist" by otherfeminists.7 But one should regard theirproject as a "deconstructive" attempt to neutralize the man/woman dichotomy, whereas the American theory of "reading as a woman"g - with its emphasis on the specific experience of women as actual human beings with sexual identities does not seem to be intent on achieving the same goal. Jonathan Culler's analysis ofthe dilemma inherent in all feminist strategies appears accurate here: Analytical·writings that attempt to neutralize the male/female opposition are extremely important, but, as Derrida says, "the hierarchy of the linear opposition always reconstitutes itself," and therefore a movement that asserts the primacy ofthe oppressed term is strategically indispensable (Positions, p. 57/42).9 Within this conceptual framework, the proclamation of a feminist poetics of theatre implicit in the writings of both Cixous and Feral cannot be dismissed as a utopian or sexist displacement. In fact, it should constitute an integral part ofa new field ofstudies: feminist dramatic research. Francophone writers who have consciously practised feminine writing since 1970 have been mainly poets, novelists or essayists: Chantal Chawaf, Helene Cixous, Jeanne Hyvrard, Annie Leclerc, Monique Wittig, etc., in...