ABSTRACT

The title of this paper is a quotation from ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ by Hélène Cixous. The quotation mobilizes terms that are central both to Cixous’s work over the last twenty years and to this collection on psychoanalysis and feminism. Focusing on questions of ‘the symbolic’, of power, and on the politics of disorder, Cixous’s work suggests new sorts of solutions to the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and feminist practice. It allows us to analyse what we mean by feminist theory or feminist criticism and to consider the implications of a theoretical practice that begins with an articulated politics: ‘feminism’ is, after all, a political term, an interrogation of power and of the possibility of change, and not just a matter of technique.