Writing and Displacement: Women in Theatre

Writing and Displacement: Women in Theatre JOSETTE FERAL translated by Barbara Kerslake Being a woman is not enough. It takes more than that to write in the feminine mode and therefore to write in a different way - a fact which is daily corroborated by the abundance ofwork written by women, on women's issues, or dealing with women, letters, short stories, novels, all the literature ofrecent years, in which the writing often remains basically unchanged, even when it is expressed in new forms of thought, new ways of using the spoken or written word. Women artists, women writers, women critics in the avant-garde, following new trends or movements with their own forms of writing, are still confined to the masculine mode unless they shatter traditional discourse. Of course there are exceptions - Helene Cixous, Monique Wittig, Sylvia Plath and Emma Santos, for example. But we still lack the critical tools for judging this "difference," let alone for thinking it, for determining how and when it operates, or even for knowing whether, in the present state of feminist criticism, it can decide which paths to follow. The quest for this difference implies the rejection of all normativity and an exploration of the possible orientations for a new kind of writing specific to women. Luce Irigaray, a French feminist writer and critic, is paving the way for work in this direction. Irigaray's position touches on the very foundations of constituted subject theory, since she tackles the problem of the dominant discourse by trying to rethink the possibilities for a new discourse (and consequently a new kind of writing), feminine discourse, in which the feminine element would be seen no longer as the Other, as non-identity, nonentity or non-unity (always in relation to the One of the Father, the Man, the Phallus), but as difference. As we have just seen, such a perspective necessitates a requestioning of all the established theories (especially the Freudian and Lacanian theories) which deplete women. Irigaray also contends that the condition for an other feminine discourse and writing cannot be articulated without questioning the symbolic itself, and that this kind of discourse cannot be couched in the same type of utterance as that 550 JOSETTE FERAL which guarantees the discursive coherence of the speaker (and this includes critical discourse). As she says: "Women must not aspire to compete with men by constructing a feminine logic which would still be modelled on "onto-theologic ," but should try instead to disengage this question from the structure ofthe logos" (CS, pp. 75-76)1; and she adds further on, "excess and disruption are possible coming from women" (CS, p. 76). What then would characterize such a feminine voice? "Simultaneity would be its distinctive feature" (p. 76), a simultaneity which rejects fixed and immutable meaning and the rigidity of the One, and would transform meaning into a continuous flow within the text. Nor would this movement go in any single direction. The text would explode in all directions at once, exactly the way woman's body (and sex organs) explode into fragments. The fragmented body constantly touches/is in touch with itself (cf. "Lips which touch each other"). Like this body, women's words touch one another again and again, always being interwoven, embracing one another, but at the same time thrusting apart, to avoid becoming fixed or rigid. It would be interesting to read Helene Cixous, Monique Wittig, Emma Santos, Sylvia Plath or Anne Hebert from this perspective. On the one hand, there is simultaneity, and on the other, contiguity. Words always touch one another, touch woman's body and mimetically trace the outline of her truest self. "When things stray too far from this proximity, she [woman] breaks off and starts allover again" (CS, p. 28). Does "woman discourse" not reproduce in fact this "structure" which is not a structure~ since it involves mobility and constant change? This makes it impossible to pin down female discourse in any definition; woman is always somewhere else, beyond a polarization around a unicity she rejects. This also prompts Irigaray to ask: "If the female imagination reached its full extent and could operate in other than a fragmentary way, in scattered...