ABSTRACT
Feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous uses Medusa as a metaphor for the powerful female voice that can carve a place for l’écriture féminine, a writing by women that subverts or rejects the ‘phallologocentrism’ of European literary discourse. In The Laugh of the Medusa, as Jennifer Rich signals, Cixous argues that ‘within a male (phallologocentric) paradigm of writing, a woman has no voice’.1 Rich unpacks the term ‘phallologocentric’, explaining that this neologism derived from Derrida and Lacan identifies writing in which ‘the Symbolic’ is organized from a paternal structure that privileges the male (represented by the phallus) and the male spoken word (logos). According to Cixous’s theory, while operating within this phallologocentric structure, a woman’s voice cannot be heard ‘as a woman’s voice’ because she does not enjoy the privilege of logos nor is she able to write her body since she does not possess a phallus.2
