Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"The Laugh of the Medusa"
In women's speech, as in their writing, that element which never stops resonating, which, once we've been permeated by it, profoundly and imperceptibly touched by it, retains the power of moving us—that element is the song: first music from the first voice of love which is alive in every woman. Why this privileged relationship with the voice? Because no woman stockpiles as many defenses for countering the drives as a man....there is always within her at least a little of that good mother's milk. She writes in white ink.
Are we in some hippy-dippy music haus, or what? First music? Writing with mother's milk? Huh?
More or less, Cixous is saying that ladies are just fundamentally different from dudes. And men, with their own power-trip mode of filling up a page, had historically dominated the worlds of creative writing and intellectual thought. In response, Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa" seriously challenges psychoanalytic theories about women's bodies, voices, and art and offers an alternative, milky method of writing.
Cixous makes the point that women in Western literature and philosophy usually show up as mysterious, dark, monstrous, and lower down on the food chain than men, and all that has taught them to be afraid and ashamed of themselves.
But she argues that if women refuse to play the roles that patriarchy gives them, they can ignite a revolution. Rather than being ashamed of being "monstrously" different from men, they should be proud of it. Let's show 'em what we're made of! We've got power reserves like they've never seen! Forget what the psychoanalysts told you—we don't want to turn away from our mothers, we don't got penis envy, and we don't want to speak with the same voices as men.
And, rather than trying to learn how to speak as men do, women should embrace a deeper, more womanly form of communication—they should write their écriture féminine. Our bodies remember our mothers, she's saying, and when we write, we're gonna show 'em what it means to live and breathe and love and speak like a WOMAN: Double-U-O-M-A-N!