Reading List for the New "Ecriture Feminine"

The French theorist Helene Cixous coined the term "ecriture feminine" in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa." For her, the term was mainly aspirational, describing a type of women's writing about a woman's inner experience of the mind and the sensations of her physical body, writing that didn't exist in the still fairly prudish and masculine popular mainstream.

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies. The Laugh of the Medusa, Helene Cixous

The vague descriptors that she used to categorize ecriture feminine left it open to interpretation. What we do know for sure is that she thought the Brazillian author Clarice Lispector perfectly fit the bill.

Since her essay was first published, nearly half a century has passed. First-person narratives by women which accurately describe particular sensations and experiences are uncountable, but not all of them pass for literature or ecriture feminine. The genre has also expanded outside of its French roots, becoming an international literary form. I've compiled a list of authors that I believe fit into the tradition of ecriture feminine, each of which varies greatly in style.

Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

Egyptian medical doctor and feminist author of the 1970s who has a very take no prisoners radical style of calling out everything she thinks is unfair about how women were treated when she was growing up. Woman at Point Zero is a book she wrote from the perspective of an inmate on death row for killing a man. If the subject matter of this book seems too dark (the inmate has faced mainly abuse her whole life before fighting back), her other works that draw on her upbringing and youth may be somewhat more sunny. Memoirs of a Woman Doctor draws on her experience of medical school, a bad marriage and then a good one, and opening up her own clinic.

Colette, The Vagabond

Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Love, Anger, Madness

San Mao, Stories of the Sahara

Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair & The Slut of the Normandy Coast

Amelie Nothomb, Loving Sabotage

Ayu Utami, Saman

Clarice Lispector, Soul Storm