Liberated Writing and ‘Forgiving Bisexuality’: A Brief Analysis of Cixous’ Concept of Bisexuality

Liberated Writing and ‘Forgiving Bisexuality’: A Brief

Analysis of Cixous’ Concept of Bisexuality

The condition of Women, if looked at from the views a woman perceives herself and the happy and sad she becomes during such moments of her real life, will be found to be very deplorable. No doubt, we have seen women in honourable positions and at helm of affairs but there is lately a question as to whether the woman in such capacities remains a woman or becomes the other (the man). Here the  question comes ‘what is this becoming?’. In looking at this, we take reference to the works and advocacy of French Feminists. French Feminist Cixous has proposed  creation of a literary culture ‘l’ecriture feminne’. The necessity to express a woman’s feelings and desires unhindered, unrepressed and uninfluenced is in the main theme of  the thought  These feelings and desires Cixous says is the basic of her perceiving and expressing and these are related intricately and inseparably with her sexuality ? very simply, the way of experiencing the world by her being a woman. The experiences of men and  women are different because they are sexually differently oriented. At times  it is  observed that a person is having both the qualities ? an instance of bisexuality.

Noted French Feminist Cixous argues the essential necessity of Bisexuality relating the disposition of one person are essential in understanding the present trend of feminism. Now- a- days we see how girls are coming forward for education and are enthusiastically taking up employment or are creating self-employment. At this moment, the women are to be very conscious and active so that they can attain their goal. Writing will be the potential tool for women in this.

The tremendous effort put by women to write and express themselves signifies the urgency to capture a space in this fast changing, highly vulnerable world of the men. She is afraid that she will be lost somewhere in the unknown and perish without  leaving a frill of her existence in this men dominated world. And this has driven many a woman to write. Writing seems to be the weapon to fight for survival. The desire to die without words and escape the world silently without resistance has come to be replaced by the desire to tell and die. The woman who was weak, who was to be protected, who used to pray her husband and god for their mercy is the woman of past.  Today’s woman is highly energetic, educated, intelligent and potential.

Everywhere, women are entering with great vigour and exposing their selves—the physical, the psychological and the sexual selves. One will be surprised to know how differently a woman changes her disposition, expression, love and hatred; her being from moment to moment. The multitude of her existence is in fact an attribute to her being and after much trial and error she has stepped in the right phase of writing—a writing which ruptures her silence. At this point, it is in great honour to the feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter if I highlight the three phases she classified chronologically to sketch out the journey of women writers in their evolutionary process of writing. Women imitated the men between1840-1880, then they protested against every kind of patriarchal dominance they faced while writing between1880-1920, and ultimately they reached the summit of their task to write and express their self after discovering and re-discovering their own selves. This has been the process since 1920 onwards. Some eminent critics of French feminism like Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva have taken a very bold and courageous step to invite women to freedom through writing. Their attempts have come very recently, yet in a very short span of time women have become able to realize that their existence should be made audible and to practically deal with the suppressed fact that they really exist.

This courage the women have gathered from their knowledge about themselves. Earlier they thought themselves to be what the men said about them but now she knows she is not what the men say her to be. Now she knows that she has her own feelings and desires — she is an independent and complete being, her ways are essentially freminist.  It is the essentialism for which feminist theories like l’écriture feminine can be hailed with. To bring out the essence of women’s existence or the very jouissance in women has been the main objective of these set of elite women. Their inspirational force is centered on the body of the woman, which is the sole site of oppression and the only site where desire or jouissance originates. Biologically, the masculine ideology defines the female body as passive as it acts as the receptacle for the sperm and sexually she is visualized as somebody who is rapable. This is the man’s woman. The visualization of the female as a subordinate/passive/irrational/frail creature triggers in fact every relation in the existing phallogocentrically dominated ideological world, where man’s beliefs, achievements, dictates, powers and even the mode of male expression is constantly in praise. The man has till now remained superior, active, rational, strong.  The definition of the female with respect to the male further activates the binary opposition between the male and the female. The new mode of writing which is a dynamic writing has entered with a bash to bring rapture between these kinds of hierarchical binary opposition. The position of the subordinate/passive/irrational/frail have been instrumentalised to crush the stances which have always otherwise imposed an obstacle for expressing. India is a land which inherits women who write in such a mode from the very arrestee position where she is.

Body     fatures in the poems of the celebrated poet Kamala Das where the woman speaks and the man listens, where the woman deceives and leaves her husband, where the woman reduces the masculinity of the male. Back home in Assam the internet is blogged with many a new upcoming writers like Anita Kashyap who has attempted to bring out Tejeemola (the most celebrated frail woman in the Assamese folk tale) to the limelight once again through her verses on Tejeemola. Tejeemola works on the mekhela chador and weaves flower on it: a sign of trying to relive a new life. The website www/assamorg.com/ hosts many women writers who are attempting to shatter completely the grammaticalised monotonous masculine language and assert their essence through a more volatile, fluid and fragmented language much like her own psychology. The woman is up to babble, the word which

Iigaray uses to define the feminine language outside the symbolic which is based on her theory of the anatomy of female genitalia, whose shape is that of two constantly touching and retouching lips. Women’s fragmented existence is reflected in her absolutely fragmented language which looses grip to any ordered flow of thought and enriches itself by multiple desires in innumerable expressions reflecting the survival of the many within one single physical entity. And therefore, Irigaray names her essay This Sex Which Is Not One.

Toril Moi perhaps takes binary opposition as a wider concept than a mere battlefield of the masculine and the feminine. She uses the word “imbricate” to place her argument. Cixous observes everywhere in nature a kind of binarisation of things where the superior positions itself above the inferior or the positive above the negative but Moi’s reading of Cixous takes an advantageous turn. She feels binary oppositions are not always against each other but they inherently support the stance of each other making the one indispensable without the other. This, however, echoes Cixous’ concept of bisexuality. Cixous dreams of an all encompassing sexuality where the difference as well as similarities should exist simultaneously rather than being monosexual. Monosexuality, Cixous feels is a limitation—a limitation which have narrowed down the perspective of men and thereby rendered their knowledge of women incomplete. It might be because men have fears to tread the path of women’s existence or because men fear the Medusa he might confront if done so.

The very attempt to define women is a wrong attitude towards understanding a woman. The woman, if defined is insulted. Inversely, if space is allowed to scribble her or let loose her then she will tell her story(s). this is the need of the hour to  give her a new birth. Cixous feels there is only one “I” who is the speaker of all the I(s) who exist within the physical entity of woman. The  I can be the questionnaire, the replier; the one who censors, the one who lets loose; the one who cries, the one who consoles; the one who trusts, the one who betrays; the one who cares, the one who needs care; the one who kills, the one who saves; the one who snatches, the one who sacrifices; the one who thinks, the one who feels; the one who earns, the one who spends; the one who escapes, the one who confronts; the one who mothers, the one who aborts; the one who fights, the one who bears; the one who speaks, the one who listens; the one who hates, the one who loves; the one who faints, the one who stands.

Language falls short to express them and they are not at all worried for they are out to express without language but with anything they are comfortable with. An anti-language. Probably, the story of this language would never reach an end. An endless liberation of the body and the breath.