January 31, 2010

Helene Cixous, where have you been all my life?

Somebody just turned me on to Helene Cixous, and from there I "discovered" écriture féminine. All this time I've been searching for a way to describe what and how I write, and all I had to do all along was learn French.

Anyway, I'm working my way through the Laugh of the Medusa resource page and a couple of essays.

Something that I'm wondering, before delving into it, is how we can expand our aesthetic discourse to include  écriture féminine. Clearly the Aristotelian approach (aka Dead White Guy method) doesn't work for the very reasons Cixous says: it's made by and for [White] men, [non-White] women's ways of experiencing and perceiving the world are by definition excluded. Liz Lerman's method opens up a new way of approaching and understanding theatre. Are there other methods out there? Can we create a method? Is attempting to explain or understand theatre from the perspective of écriture féminine doomed to failure by irony?

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