SOURCE: Jouve, Nicole Ward. “Hélène Cixous across the Atlantic: The Medusa as Projection?” In Traveling Theory: France and the United States, edited by Ieme van der Poel and Sophie Bertho, pp. 99-113. Madison, N.J., and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 1999.

In the following essay, Jouve discusses Hélène Cixous's theories regarding feminine identity—particularly as expressed in the essay “The Laugh of the Medusa”—and notes how Cixous's critical writings have often been misread or misinterpreted in the United States and abroad.

In the last thirty years or so, America got used to importing, or shooting, the best of the gray cells of Europe. Each country provided its specialty. Nazism and the war had already produced mid-European Jewish physicists or analysts: they were there to stay. The USSR and UK provided novelists. Ireland provided poets. France had been such a...