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m0rozovas's review
4.0
I think we should take very carefully this essay and consider its historical context. We cann0t view it with contemporary 3rd-wave lenses, because it then comes as heavily transphobic and even racist with its constants comparisons of woman with the "Black Continent".
However, Cixous's call for the sexual liberation of women was refreshing during her time, only a few years after the Revolution of Paris '68. However, this liberation also calls for a check, because liberalism has appropriated it and made little girls believe that posting nudes is somehow liberating when it actually only contributes to the objectification of women, especially when those nudes are subject to the male gaze that inevitably, as Atwood points out, follows us wherever we go because it's already ingrained into our subconscious.
Still, the reivindication of the femenine without associating it to death and the monstrous is revolutionary unto itself, since it falls away from the male gaze that had associated them for the past century, especially during and after Romanticism. "[Medusa] is beautiful, and she is laughing." This reivindication allows women to feel feminine unapologetically, claiming and exploring their feminity and their bodies back.
All in all, this essay is necessary, but its social and historical context is almost as important as its content.
However, Cixous's call for the sexual liberation of women was refreshing during her time, only a few years after the Revolution of Paris '68. However, this liberation also calls for a check, because liberalism has appropriated it and made little girls believe that posting nudes is somehow liberating when it actually only contributes to the objectification of women, especially when those nudes are subject to the male gaze that inevitably, as Atwood points out, follows us wherever we go because it's already ingrained into our subconscious.
Still, the reivindication of the femenine without associating it to death and the monstrous is revolutionary unto itself, since it falls away from the male gaze that had associated them for the past century, especially during and after Romanticism. "[Medusa] is beautiful, and she is laughing." This reivindication allows women to feel feminine unapologetically, claiming and exploring their feminity and their bodies back.
All in all, this essay is necessary, but its social and historical context is almost as important as its content.
casparb's review
4.0
I don't usually put an essay on here but this was such a delight and I'm glad I made time for Cixous at last. 4.5 Thank you Kate for reminding me I'd not read her yet. Perhaps it's just been an oversaturation lately, but Cixous writes polemically and poetically and they seem exquisitely to me.
"Beauty will no longer be forbidden."
So the text is a call to action and a gorgeous interaction with a lot of 20thc people. Cixous spends time on Freud and scrawling on his corpse. But I don't know that it's hatred. She does beautiful things with her friend Derrida and there are other interactions that I won't mention here.
"Let the priests tremble, we're going to show them our sexts!"
Sexuality, body, writing. I think we can be a bit wary of a feminist text from this period (a certain GG comes to mind). HC's language does operate within a binary of sorts but I would say that the conceptual energy she delivers here quite escapes (and welcomes this escape!) the more distasteful elements of certain critics of the period. I should read her more
"You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing."
.
http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576F10/cixous.pdf
"Beauty will no longer be forbidden."
So the text is a call to action and a gorgeous interaction with a lot of 20thc people. Cixous spends time on Freud and scrawling on his corpse. But I don't know that it's hatred. She does beautiful things with her friend Derrida and there are other interactions that I won't mention here.
"Let the priests tremble, we're going to show them our sexts!"
Sexuality, body, writing. I think we can be a bit wary of a feminist text from this period (a certain GG comes to mind). HC's language does operate within a binary of sorts but I would say that the conceptual energy she delivers here quite escapes (and welcomes this escape!) the more distasteful elements of certain critics of the period. I should read her more
"You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing."
.
http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576F10/cixous.pdf
elgonher's review
5.0
I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune.