Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. [Vol. 5.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 25)

Studies - András Tarnóc: Voices From the Wild Zone: Three Versions of the Feminist Aesthetic in American Culture

Whereas Kristeva originates female creativity and literary production from psychological repression, Luce Irigaray argues that women's language and writing stem from repressed sexuality. Following her "two lips" theory, derived from the anatomical characteristics of the female genitals, women's language is characterized by contiguity. Héléne Cixous" origination of female writing from the repressed female libido not only attempts to break from Kristeva and Irigaray's essentialism but underlines the difficulty in defining the female aesthetic: It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded

—which doesn 't mean that it doesn 7 exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate. ( Cixous 340) For Cixous writing is a means of fighting against patriarchy, and is an expression of "repressed female sexuality" (Weedon 68). As a return to the body "an uncanny stranger on display," (68) the process in itself is a revolutionary act. Cixous considers language as a concealer of an invisible enemy, male syntax and grammar (qtd in Kolodny 149). The critical means of resistance against the phallogocentric order is jouissance, a multitiered experience of sexual pleasure (Stanton 77). Monique Wittig's Les Guérilléres (1969), promotes the image of the Amazon stepping beyond the sexual, political, and linguistic categories of the phallogocentric order (Jones 370). The famous maxim that French feminists emphasize repression, their British counterparts stress oppression, and American feminists concentrate upon expression refers to the existence of an intellectual debate between French and American feminist thinking. The attempt to reconcile the theoretical French and the pragmatic American 99