Stop Telling My Words What To Do

One thing I noticed in regards to Cixous' "The Laugh of Medusa" and Barbara Smith's "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" is the instruction in which the authorial voice poses on the reader. With Cixous, she says "I must write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man." The didactic nature of Cixous piece is apparent, obvious, and the purpose of the theory to take away of "écriture feminine" of "women's writing." But Cixous contradicts herself when she says that both men and women can produce écriture féminine. What is women's writing if not produced by a women? Doesn't the entirety of literary western canon fall into some sort of écriture féminine if you make a strong enough argument for it?

I recall in my undergraduate literary theory course one student had a big problem with the theory of écriture feminine because after a while, all the authors and works of literature we chose to definite as such were all written by men, similar to Cixous's examples in her "Laugh of Medusa." But to that, I argue there's something flawed in the premise that something written by a woman is inherently feminine, or that you can tell it was written by a women. We're essentializing the product of someone's imagination to correlate merely with their genitals. How would something written by a tranwoman or transman be perceived?

Essentialism is something Barbara Smith does as well; in that there is something that all critics need to have and be familiar with if they are to be "Black feminist critics." With Barbara Smith's "Towards a Black Feminist Criticism", she acknowledges the space that black women occupy in being ignored by "all segments of the literary world - whether establishment, progressive, Black, female, or lesbian - do not know, or at least act as if they do not know, that Black women writers and Black lesbian writers exist." Smith is responding to a view that the feminist movement represented the perspective of white, middle-class, heterosexual women, and that the civil rights movement was made of black men. But the major thing that struck me with her article the way it seemed to instruct how to be a "black feminist critic" : "Before suggesting how a Black feminist approach might be used to examine a specific work, I will outline some of the principles that I think a Black feminist critic could use" (2229). Despite the suggestive tone Smith frames her principles, I felt that Smith was saying this is how a Black feminist critic should be.

Why must theorists and critics tell women to do anything at all? Isn't this command just as bad as the men and people in power declaring their own will over that of women and female-bodied persons? It reminds me of Luce Irigaray's "This Sex Which is Not One" in which she says that in order for "woman's development" to take place, the "renunciation of heterosexual pleasure" must happen first. She acknowledges this stance as problematic and understands that even is all women were to "expand their autoeroticsms, [preserve] their homosexuality" that it still wouldn't solve all the problems that sexism and that elevation of the phallus seems to brine and that having a "matriarchy" does not solve the problems of a patriarchy. For if there is a matriarchy, there is still something being given elevated status over the other.