In Feminist Theory
The French feminist writer Hélène Cixous uses the term jouissance to describe a form of women's pleasure or sexual rapture that combines mental, physical and spiritual aspects of female experience, bordering on mystical communion. Cixous maintains that jouissance is the source of a woman's creative power, and the suppression of jouissance prevents women from finding their own fully empowered voice. The concept of jouissance is explored by Cixous and other authors in their writings on Écriture féminine, a strain of feminist literary theory that originated in France in the early 1970s.
Other feminists have argued that Freudian "hysteria" is jouissance distorted by patriarchal culture and claim that jouissance is a transcendent state that represents freedom from oppressive linearities. In her introduction to Cixous' The Newly Born Woman, literary critic Sandra Gilbert writes: "to escape hierarchical bonds and thereby come closer to what Cixous calls jouissance, which can be defined as a virtually metaphysical fulfillment of desire that goes far beyond satisfaction... fusion of the erotic, the mystical, and the political."
Read more about this topic: Joissance
Famous quotes containing the words feminist and/or theory:
“Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of gov’t as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by gov’t. Somewhere in between and in gradations is the group that has the sense that gov’t exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)