ABSTRACT
How did French feminism take hold in America? During an approximately twenty-year period from the mid-1970s onward, an immense wave of intellectual enthusiasm arose in response to the thought of the women who became known as the French feminists, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Hundreds of essays and articles have analyzed and documented the “French connections” which opened Anglo-American feminism to Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. This collective infatuation was not entirely without precedent. It was part of a more general fascination with French thought which dominated this period, embracing such thinkers as Barthes, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida, and recalling the prestige and influence of Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus on the previous generation of artists and intellectuals. What is different about the impact of French feminism is the clearly defined focus of the movement on three specific writers-their names often recited together in ritual homage-and the intensity and duration of passions generated. We can wonder why and how the threesome of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, coming from a country whose feminist politics were in some ways light years behind those of Anglo-Saxon countries, came to represent the vanguard of feminist thinking. How has
such a longlasting climate of excitement been maintained around these writers, whose names are well known even if their works are not always widely read?
