ABSTRACT
This translation by K. and P.Cohen originally published in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, 4:875-893. This is a revised version of ‘Le rire de la méduse’, which appeared in L’arc (1975), 3945. Reproduced by permission of University of Chicago Press with the consent of K.Cohen and the author. In this extract from one of her most celebrated essays, Cixous insists that difference must be at the heart of our understanding of bisexuality.The difference to which she is alluding is sexual difference: that is, in the psychoanalytic tradition (with which Cixous is explicitly engaging here, referring to both Freud and Lacan), with the difference between masculinity and femininity, rather than that between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Cixous’ larger argument (Sellers 1994) is that psychoanalytic accounts of bisexuality, in the sense of masculinity and femininity, actually obscure and neutralize sexual difference, because they privilege the masculine over the feminine and insist that the latter may only be defined or understood in relation to the former —in other words, that femininity only exists in so far as it is the opposite or negative of masculinity. Against this ‘neuter’ bisexuality which represents difference only in negative terms, Cixous posits what she calls the ‘other bisexuality’ —a dynamic bisexuality in which masculinity and femininity are positively different from each other, so that femininity can be seen to exist in its own right rather than solely in relation to masculinity. This ‘other bisexuality’ finds its expression, according to Cixous, in ‘feminine writing’: a form of writing which either male or female authors may develop (the example she cites here is from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1992 [1922])), and which affirms sexual difference as difference. Bisexuality in this sense is neither static nor neutral, but is dynamic, in process, and vibrantly alive.
