Loving Across Borders: The Queer, Transspecies Intimacies of Cixousian Sexual Difference

On ne peut même pas d'ailleurs en venir à bout puisque [… la Méduse,] elle est tentaculaire, elle est insaisissable, elle glisse comme la méduse.

("Méduse en Sorbonne" 143–44)

In Hélène Cixous's texts, sexual difference cannot be seen, but rather is experienced through sensory engagement with others. Twenty-first century readings of Cixousian sexual difference have bypassed essentialist claims and rearticulate sexual difference as something to be read and deciphered outside of the realm of the visible.¹ Cixous's deconstructionist approach displaces sexual difference, which historically has been located between male and female bodies. This article further insists on the radical inclusivity of Cixousian sexual difference by tending to its openness to intimacies between the human and nonhuman animal "other." Forging a space for transspecies communication, Cixous's writing disrupts the human/animal species hierarchy by exposing animals' emotional intelligence and complex forms of communication.²

Cixous has always written on/with non-human animals as a way not only to examine alterity but also to poetically generate connective tissue that bridges across perceived differences by identifying common, transspecies acts like "thinking, laughing, suffering, mourning, and above all, speech" (The Portable Cixous 145).³ Scholarship treating the nonhuman animal in Cixous's work has emphasized the "animal humanity" that manifests in animals' capacity for suffering and unconditional love, and has also underlined the divine viewpoint that Cixous attributes to her animals.⁴ However, while scholars have noted the ways in which Cixous's texts rupture ontological barriers between human and animal, few have highlighted the ways in which her work on animality dialogues with her conception of sexual difference.

This article connects these scholarly conversations by considering Cixous's understudied writing on animals in light of her work on sexual difference. I examine representations of nonhuman animals in "Le Rire de la Méduse" (1975, 2010), Messie (1996), and "Nous en somme" (2006), along with descriptions of the heart in "Contes de la différence sexuelle" (1994), to rethink intimacy within human-animal relationships as fostering queer kinship that veers from heteronormative, anthropocentric accounts of intimacy.⁵ My use of "intimacy" complicates and opens up the type of "love" shared between these species, by considering love as an attentive caress that produces pleasure. By placing a selection of Cixous's texts in dialogue with strands of queer theory, I examine the ways in which transspecies physical and metaphorical touch fosters sexual difference. Specifically, through a study of Mel Y. Chen's Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2012), I demonstrate how Cixous's disturbance of sexual identity and intimacy brings her work into the realm of queer scholarship. Ultimately, considering the ways in which the human and nonhuman animal relationship generates sexual difference demands that we reevaluate the meaning of "sexual" and foreground corporeal sensation in the discovery of sexual being, which, as Crevier Goulet claims, (re)asserts the body as a source of knowledge (311).

I begin my study by examining Cixous's own deployment of "queer" in her 2010 description of the Medusa, where she posits the figure's contemporary relevance. I then consider how Cixous's queering (i.e. disturbing, repurposing) of Medusa's etymology affords linguistic intimacy between Medusa and the jellyfish, thereby making space for transspecies communication. The metaphorical touch between the medusas frames my reading of Cixous's brief coup de foudre with a faun, whose half-goat body complicates the human/animal divide, and whose mythology allows us to imagine transspecies intimacies.

Next, I turn to Cixous's writings on her cats. I analyze the roles of the "heart" and "love" in the production of Cixousian sexual difference and examine the ways in which metaphorical transspecies intimacies influence human interactions with domesticated animals. I conclude by examining the connection between the animal figures introduced in this article through the trope of the crown, an image that suggests divinity as well as the twisting, unpredictable sex and sexuality of the human and animal figures Cixous portrays.

Queer Speech: The Jellyfish as Metonymous Medusa

La...