A woman's body, with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor-once, by smashing yokes and censors, she lets it articolate the profusion of meanings that run through it in every direction-will make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with more than one language...

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence", the one that aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word "impossible" and writes it as "the end."

--helene cixous 'the laugh of the medusa'

So I should be working harder on this than I am, but I promised myself I'd get to it. Right now I just wanted to update quickly and say that although I chose cixous for my paper, well her and derrida... I'm not exactly tearing through her writing and finding a lot of analytical work. The woman means what she says when she advocates contradictory statements about language. It seems, at this early stage in the game, that my understanding of her is that through a system of hegemonic sublation women have been repressed in their sexuality and their writing, forced to participate in a masculine system of writing that does not work in the same logic that ecriture feminine (feminine writing) does.

It's worth exploring. And so I'm off, to gather my mosquito netting and dress my elephant... let exploration begin!