ABSTRACT
In literary and academic circles, Helene Cixous's identity as a writer had been bound up with her academic and literary explorations of questions of gender: in particular the gender of writing, and the possibility of writing in the feminine gender, using an ecriture feminine. The critique of autobiography in Photos de racines is, quite literally, only part of the story. In her two later Algerian-themed autobiographical works, Cixous resorts to very different strategies of writing herself. Cixous argues that women, unlike men, are unable to infuse their writing with their own subjectivity: the particularly feminine subjectivity that marks them as women. In Sidonie Smith's reading, Cixous produces in 'Le Rire de la meduse' a radical, feminist form of self-writing which takes the demolition of established genres such as autobiography as just the first of its political aims. The participation of Cixous's academic interlocutors in Photos de racines implicitly provides some indication of the importance the other has in Cixous's self-realization.
