CUTE GIRL

If so, what is it? French literary theorist Helene Cixous asserted in her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” that women should break away from the phallogocentric, linear narrative, and shoot for a more circular, disjunctive, “feminine” writing (l’ecriture feminine). Luce Irigaray in “The Sex Which is Not One” makes similar claims, again relating writing styles to genitalia (vulva = circular, multiple, non-linear writing, penis = linear, penetrative writing). Cixous writes of the woman who ascribes to masculine styles of phallogocentric writing that she “cuts herself out a paper penis.”