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Écriture féminine, or "women's writing", is a term coined by French feminist and literary theorist Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa".
"The Laugh of the Medusa" is an exhortation and call for a "feminine mode" of writing which Cixous calls "white ink" and écriture féminine. Cixous builds the text using the elements of this mode and fills it with literary allusions. She instructs women to use writing as a means of authority.
La venue à l'écriture. U.G.E. Collection 10/18. 1977. Entre l'écriture. Des femmes. 1986. L'heure de Clarice Lispector, précédé de Vivre l'Orange. Des femmes. 1989. Hélène Cixous, Photos de Racines. Des femmes. 1994. Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif [Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint]. Paris: Galilée. 2001.
The academic discipline of women's writing is a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men."
Écriture féminine literally means women's writing. It is a philosophy that promotes women's experiences and feelings to the point that it strengthens the work. It is a strain of feminist literary theory that originated in France in the 1970s. Cixous first uses this term in her essay, The Laugh of the Medusa in which she asserts:
Écriture féminine, postmodern feminist literary theory; Feminist literary criticism; Women in speculative fiction, including science fiction; Women's page, newspaper section for topics presumed to interest women; Women's script (disambiguation), variation of syllabic characters in some writing systems
During the feminine phase, female writers adhered to male values. In the feminist phase, there was a theme of criticism of women's role in society. And in the female phase, it was now assumed that women's works were valid, and the works were less combative than in the feminist phase.
Moi made her name with Sexual/Textual Politics (1986), a survey of second-wave feminism in which she contrasted the more empirical Anglo-American school of writings, such as gynocriticism, with the more theoretical French proponents of Ecriture feminine.