Joissance - in Feminist Theory

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."