Verena Andermatt Conley (Essay Date 1984)

SOURCE: Conley, Verena Andermatt. "Textual Strategies." In Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine, pp. 3-13. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

In the following essay, Conley addresses Cixous's theories of feminine discourse and illustrates the author's opinions of the femininity and masculinity of texts and writing.

May 1968: student-worker uprisings, the occupation of the Sorbonne—a stronghold of out-worn pedagogical traditions. Intellectuals cast aside their differences and march in the streets. Their demands: new universities; improved curricula; access to schools for everyone, not just for the privileged few. The political ferment is paralleled by an intellectual ferment with the advent of the human sciences, and readings in philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, linguistics. It is a period of belief in the revolutionary power of language and of hopes for a shattering of millenary oppressive structures. Women want their share. They rally behind the banner...