Introduction
Is there such a thing as “feminine discourse”? Is there a discernable difference between the writing of male and female authors? People discussing this subject are trying to find out. There is a discussion about this subject even in different languages as if writing is not dependent upon language. If these intellectuals find a “feminine writing”, is this good or bad? Would “feminine writing” be based upon biology or culture? These are just a few questions about this topic.
While I would, personally, not argue that there is or is not a “feminine voice”, I would be put to task to define the difference. I know that I, as a reader, am one of the minorities who hear a voice while reading. This makes my reading slower, but my retention is also higher. I also notice that I do not remember being wrong about the gender of the writer, even when I read the text of a type where I do not immediately note the author, especially in academic writing. I often do not pay a lot of attention to the author before reading non-fiction, but when I find out the author’s name I can normally extrapolate the gender from it. While collaborative writing may be problematic, I do not remember ever noting that I had heard the wrong voice. It would be very interesting to find out why. Perhaps, in passing, I saw the author’s name and yet did not notice it consciously, but my mind matched it anyway. Perhaps, there is a difference between male and female writing.
Susan Sellers
I found Susan Sellers to be a little difficult to pin down. She quotes Cixous, and she attaches texts, but I just cannot make the connection between them. For example, in the introduction Sellers writes: “Cixous suggests that feminine writing is potentially the province of both sexes, she believes women are currently closer to a feminine economy than men. As a result, she sees in women’s writing the potential to circumvent and reformulate existing structures through the inclusion of other experiences…..Cixous suggests that feminine writing will bring into existence alternative forms of relation, perception, and expression.” (Sellers xxix) While this is interesting, she does not describe these alternative forms of relation, perception, and expression. She mentions a close connectedness to the body, but is this biological or sociological? Is sociology a proper basis for describing gender-based writing?
In addition, she mentions a “feminine economy”, but nowhere did I find a good definition of this phrase. Perhaps she means an economy based upon things other than power? This, I think, would be a feminine economy, a value system based upon things other than power. I did, finally, find such a definition in another book by Sargisson, “Cixous’s concept of feminine writing is, as stated in Chapter 4, not necessarily gender-specific (although she points out that women do, by their shared historical experience of culture and society, have a closer relation to a non-possessive economy than do most men).” (Sargisson 152) However, further into Sellers’s book, I did find discussions of power based as being part of feminine fantasy. I found this idea confusing. When did female fantasies include power? All the fantasies I have heard described in movies, books, and by friends were sensual, based upon feelings and enjoyment, not power.
Rape and Writing in the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre by Cholakian
Cholakian starts her book, Rape and Writing in the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre (1991), with a quote from Cixous that says that she (Cixous) believes that feminine writing does not yet exist. Then Cholakian continues with research by Philippe Lejeune that does not identify anything specific to female writers. He studied a group of twelve new female journal writers and examined them carefully for characteristics that were different from male writing and found none. He thought that by using new writers he would escape the culturally learned writing. By the time I worked my way into this text, I was beginning to think that “feminine writing” maybe a linguistic political football. “Postmodernism’s assault on traditional and essentialist modes of thought has placed feminists in a double bind, forcing them to choose between an epistemology that defines the gendered self as a social construct and a politics that claims the uniqueness of women’s experience.” (Cholakian 2)
Cholakian says that Nancy K. Miller argues that the difference lies in the content and themes of women’s texts. (Cholakian 2) However, this would seem to be a useless definition, since there would be far too many exceptions for which to account. Several authors, such as Jardine, look for a connection to sexuality in “feminine writing”. However, all of these are still based upon content. While it is certainly possible that women favor certain types of content over others, is there a “feminine content” any more than there is “feminine writing”? Miller claims that feminine writing seeks power. I think many women would argue with this as would feminists. Equality is not power; it is an absence of powerlessness. Cholakian sticks to the content analysis and seems to believe that it is closely connected to the female writer’s need to escape the plot of men to enslave women and tie them to a phallic pole. Basing the gender of writing on content would take us back 50 to 100 years in social development. If we did that, which domains would be male and which female? I doubt that anyone wants to make that distinction. We would lose far too much.
By page 220 of this book, Cholakian has given numerous examples, all tied to the idea that women write about different content or content differently. However, her examples all seem “feminist” rather than just simply feminine. In addition, on page 220 she asserts that women write differently about women. So do male feminists. While I believe that feminism is valuable and a valid concept, it cannot be used to describe a gender difference in writing. Cixous’s writing supports this idea. “Man can also be integrated into her examples of dialogue with the readers, but only if his femininity is not repressed: “Because he doesn’t fantasize his sexuality around a faucet” (57). She ends up with a “we” where she is integrating these “feminine” men.” (Lie 8) I think many feminists of both genders would take issue with this idea.
The feminine and feminism
All of this points to the main danger in these discussions: that feminine and feminist might be confused. One is gender while the other is political and sociological. Perhaps many of these participants in this discussion are merely confused. On the one hand, we are looking for a difference based upon biological differences, but people are pointing to differences based upon culture and sociological concepts. Do we want to make gender political? Can we? I doubt it. Gender is biological and that is all. While there are many things, such as pelvic arrangement and internal organs, which can definitively be identified as female or male. I am still not certain that writing is one of them.
Barbara Freeman, in an interesting account of the “mind-body problem” as it relates to Cixous’ work, underlines two main lines of attack that have been used to pin down “écriture feminine:” “First, they accuse her of essentialism because they think that in her work the body functions as an origin which has a direct unmediated relation to “feminine writing”. Secondly, Cixous’s alleged conceptualization of the body is criticized as not only conservative but even as fundamentally dangerous to feminist political change” (Freeman 59-60). (Aneja 60) Why would feminists even want there to be some way of identifying female writing? I cannot conceive of any possible good this could do. It is rather like trying to say that there is “female” driving or research or any other product of intellectual endeavor. When we find a way to divide, we usually, as a human population, find some way to make one better than the other. Perhaps it would be better never to identify any difference. Of course, there is always a possibility that “female writing” would be found to be superior, but even in that unlikely event, is that what we, as a culture, really want to do?
Since it seems that many of the participants are not talking about a biological difference at all, let us look at this from another point of view. Heilbrun and Miller looked closely at Cixous and decided that she was not talking about biology at all. Yet, they continue with this quote, “Therefore, to say that a man writes feminine writing better than a woman does, that is, to say that he can write better than a woman, is perhaps only saying that there will be a writing that will better express his femininity than a woman will express her male femininity.” (Heilbrun et al 30) If one manages to get through all the convoluted curves of this statement, one arrives at men are not women, but they can pretend to be, and in so doing, they are better at cross-gender understanding than a woman would be. Really? I think we are getting lost in semantics here, and maybe the whole idea of “feminine writing” is an exercise in attempting to change the language once again. Is feminist no longer politically correct?
Heilbrun et al go on to explain that only a woman can write herself. That is, to write about anything which is intimately tied to the female gender one would have to be female. This is, probably true. However, the opposite is also true. No woman can understand the feeling of male orgasm or even such a mundane thing as urinating through a penis. A transsexual comes close, but there are certain biological reasons that the sensation would not be the same. Just as this is true, no man could understand how it feels to carry and give birth to a child. So understanding certain subjects would have a gender base. However, does this make the writing gendered? I would think that the subject would be gendered, and that would be true whether or not the writer was male or female. Now we might not be disposed to give much credence to an account of childbirth in the first-person viewpoint of the mother if written by a man, any more than we would believe a female knows how it feels to commit rape. However, we might read with intense interest to understand the author’s perception. Is either writing like this gendered?
Heilbrun and Miller go on to question the existence of “feminine writing”. I am weary of the notion of “feminine writing,” developed in recent years, insofar as it claims to define what is feminine. Feminism is not, for me, an ontology, or a metaphysics that would define a woman as being, but a political and poetic movement that incites women and each woman to be, without any prejudice concerning what this being should be. (Heilbrun et al 59) They describe French feminism as being closely connected to spiritual ideas, and as having metaphysical or naturalist currents. The authors of this book believe that if there is such a thing as “feminine writing” it will not be found by examining content. They do, however, deplore the idea that if there is a “feminine writing” it will not be characterized as masculine (rational, clear, philosophical). Many women write like this, but they have not been termed “masculine writers”. We do not want to draw the line this way, even if such an idea were rational.
The Reader, the Text and the Poem
In investigating the possible existence of “feminine writing”, I found that most discussions seem to be more sociologically based, and this would seem to deviate from biology. However, there is another angle that needs attention. Is writing anything without the reader? Is writing transmission or transactional? In Rosenblatt’s texts, particularly The Reader, the Text and the Poem (1935), one finds that there are two types of text: Efferent and Aesthetic. She describes reading for information as efferent and reading for impact as aesthetic. Efferent would be telephone books, directions for use, recipe books, etc. It is easily expressed and carried away. Aesthetic reading, on the other hand, is a mingling of what the author provides with what the reader already knows, transactional reading. According to Rosenblatt, most writing is transactional. Therefore, half of the text is provided by the reader. What the reader brings to the writing is as important for meaning as what the writer brings. This is why most writers seek to know about their readers so that the communication will be that much improved.
Given that writing is mostly transactional, how can we define it by gender? If there is such a thing as “feminine writing” what is it when a reader is a man? Is it different when the reader is a woman? Actually, yes, it is different according to the gender of the reader, whether or not the writing is “feminine”. So what will we do if we find this “feminine writing”? Will we analyze it according to who is reading it? Will there be “feminine writing” and “masculine contribution”? What about “masculine writing” with “feminine contribution”?
Conclusion
After extensive research, I still find no basis for the existence of “feminine writing”. For many reasons I find this relieving. We have enough gender-based problems in our culture without creating more. I cannot imagine that finding a definitive difference in writing based upon gender could be good. Wherever we find difference we try to order that difference by value. Sociologically, women have almost always come out on the losing end of this. Besides, any such addition to the value system devalues us all, women and men. There are male and female people and some biology can also be characterized as gender differenced. We should leave it at that.
References
Aneja, Anu. “3 The Medusa’s Slip: Hélène Cixous and the Underpinnings of Écriture Féminine.” Helene Cixous: Critical Impressions. Ed. Lee A. Jacobus and Regina Barreca. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1999. 57-70.
Cholakian, Patricia Francis. Rape and Writing in the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University, 1991.
Heilbrun, Carolyn G., and Nancy K. Miller, eds. Shifting scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing, and Politics in Post-68 France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Lie, Sissel. “1 Life Makes Text from My Body: a Reading of Hélène Cixous’ La Venue à L’écriture.” Helene Cixous: Critical Impressions. Ed. Lee A. Jacobus and Regina Barreca. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1999. 1-20.
Sargisson, Lucy. Contemporary Feminist Utopianism. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Sellers, Susan, ed. The Helene Cixous Reader. London: Routledge, 1994.