Hélène Cixous (pronounced ‘siksu’, born 1937) is a philosopher, critic, academic, essayist, librettist, novelist, screenwriter and playwright whose complex and challenging ideas have seeped into the public consciousness without always being fully understood. This article provides an overview of Cixous’s most famous essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975), to encourage you to think about how you might apply her ideas to some of your A-level texts.
As the Poetry Foundation’s introduction to her work points out, ‘Cixous’s early life was formative in the development of her thinking about power, nationality, and identity’ (Poetry Foundation website). She was born in 1937 in Algeria in north Africa, then a French colony. Her parents were progressive Jewish intellectuals: her father, who died young, was Algerian, and her mother German. Cixous has stated that her writing ‘was born… out of a lost country of the dead father and the foreign mother’ (op. cit.). In a 2016 lecture, she noted the impact of her early bilingualism in French and German:
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