Creativity and Sexuality

In her essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa," Helene Cixous explores binary oppositions and how man and woman are grouped into those oppositions and what implications those oppositions have for female expression or repression through writing and creativity. When we listed different binary oppositions in class and then had to place "man" and "woman" at the top of those lists, our group had placed "woman" at the top of the list which contained words like secular, as opposed to sacred, dark, as opposed to light, passive, as opposed to agressive or penetrating. I think our group jumped at putting woman with the more "negative" terms because of the discourse we have used in our lives to talk about women in history, literature, or everyday life. We see that woman has received the short end of the stick. If they are portrayed as good, then they are domesticated, maternal, an encouragor to the male leading figure. If they are portrayed as bad, they are the temptress, the loose women, the demented monster. The woman never wins. She is always in relation to man.

Cixous tries to combat this by encouraging women to unleash their creativity in writing through physical exploration in Eros love. This doesnt necessarily completely mean sex, though exploration of sexuality is a large part of Cixous' argument. She makes reference to Sigmund Freud’s geometrical concept of castration, refined but not substantially changed by Lacan, which defines woman not in terms of what she has but in terms of what she lacks, this is, a penis. Cixous calls on the assumption that the pen is seen as a phallic symbol which impregnates the page and gives birth to the writing, but women cannot do this. They cannot impregnate but only be impregnated. Therefore, they are only readers, not writers. But Cixous challenges this by encouraging women to explore themselves sexually and not be passive or embarrassed about it. We talked a little bit about this suppression in class, and Dr. Powers wondered if it still existed, if women were still ashamed to talk of their bodies.

I know that Chelsea brought up the fact that Cixous seems to just focus on the sexual aspect of the physicality of women, and she suggested that women can unleash their creativity physically through other means like athleticism, but I think there is something to say about the focus on sexuality. I do believe that sexuality has been a suppressed area of female being, and Cixous realizes it needs to be addressed. I recently read The Vagina Monologues. This series of monologues about female sexuality and empowerment deals with this very suppression. It deals with the words for female sex organs and how society still hesitates to use them in everyday speech, or at least in positive terms. One piece talks extensively about the word "cunt." Even now, I inwardly cringe when I hear the word. You do too, I think. And why is that? Why cant we say the word "cunt" or "vagina" without blushing, but we always talk about penises and what they represent and how they are talked about and interpreted? I wonder why female sexuality is muffled and downplayed in relation to male sexuality. I do not believe, and I dont think Cixous does either, that women lack what men have, that is, a penis. True, we do not have penises, but we do have a whole, complex world of sex organs going on inside us. We have a uterus and fallopian tubes and vulva and clitoris and ovaries which all work for pleasure and life. If anything, the women gives life, not the man. Without the women, "life" on the page would not exist. I think this is what Cixous is saying women must tap into to get back their creativity. Sexuality does matter for Cixous and it should for all women, because I do think it is still repressed. It is still not talked about. Women are still seen as the pure virgin or the slut, both not so well-rounded images. And it is 2008. Why is that opposition still in place? With the women's rights movement and feminism, why can we still not talk about female sexuality? Why do we still think it isnt important?