Helene Cixous' article "The Laugh of the Medusa" reads like one of modernism's flamboyant, structuralist manifestoes, but she qualifies her generalizations by emphasising that she is not talking about a typical, general woman (she says there is no such thing). Rather, she discusses what women have in common, that is, the Woman, or the gender-oriented processes which operate through and around women in patriarchal culture. This shift, from viewing Woman as an unchanging universal truth which women must necessarily aspire to, to Woman as a shifting, culturally and historically specific construct, involves a recognition of women's struggles beneath male dominated cultural processes as unnecessary and capable of being reformed. Cixous foregounds this struggle by valorizing the new forms, the differences and complexity of cultural activity, which emerge out of women's practices - that is, how, when expressed, women's desires and experiences are are fantastic, radical, innovative, original, how they "burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune" (246), that is, the traditional male canon of literature whose types normally represent Women.

Cixous is saying here that in the mirror culture provides for them, women see their emotions as monstrous, and recognize themselves as monsters. However this mirror provides not a natural reflection, but a linguistic construction of Woman which women are coerced into striving towards by cultural forces. Cixous here argues that women are afraid to write, to express themselves before this mirror, because writing has been marked as Male, as public. "[Y]ou've written a little, but in secret, and it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secrete, not to go further, but to attentuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off" (247). Women usually write as females and in private, so feel guilty when they write in public. They try to express their bodies out of view of the mirror because the Woman in the mirror doesn't write. Female writing has no validation "as" writing because Men, capitalist machinery, publishing houses, smug-faced readers, managing editors, big bosses etc, all reject it and deny it “as” writing. Even until recently (the urge no doubt still exists) women were published under male pseudonyms, because the male voice was the only one allowed to speak publicly. To publish under a female name was to devalue the text.

Cixous says this repression must be resisted, or ignored. Along the same lines as post-colonialist theorists in regards to colonised people, she suggests that women (the colonised) should learn to speak for themselves and not let men (the coloniser) speak for them. Woman should write woman, man should write man. This phrasing is important, for a man can usually justify writing "about" women's experiences, as long as he understands he is not writing women's experiences but mediating them. Of course, for the sake of optomism, it must be recognized here that it takes a lot of cultural energy for the male to persist "proving" that female's lack agency: the continual marginalization and reification of females as monsters, as Others, as a "dark continent", is a process which is always-already resisted. Women's desires never go away, they are only sublimated by continual force, and can always find new channels for expression. There are always failures in the colonizer's control, always tactical spaces which can be exploited. In relation to what I have said about man writing "about" women, Cixous specifies, for example, that some men are not afraid of female expression, and some areas of artistic expression survive capitalist and patriarchal machinery and manage to disrupt the surface that conceals it. The expression of the unconscious often involves insufficient compensations, the suffering, the "sickness", of women. But the unconscious of culture does always return in some form. If this were not so, Cixous' article would not exist. And as this implies and Cixous explicitly argues, language is a significant space where the unconscious returns: it is a utopian space for change.

There are, Cixous argues, two inseparable levels of change here which we can roughly equate with the private-personal and public-political binary respectively: a) individual writing, which must be pursued because a woman's body has been confiscated from her, and she cannot fight without it. She must kill the false body, the types, which Man has made for her, because only after she reclaims her individual body can she be a fully breathing, functional political subject. Consequently, b) this living politicized body must take every opportunity to speak so as to shatter the history which has denied her body. Cixous argues here that it is by speaking, by writing, that "women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the Symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence" (251). For the written history is part of the phallocentric tradition of historical "truth". This "truth" ignores female agency, denies her version of, her participation in, history. By marking language as male, Man has denied the existence of female writing, or a female influence in history; He has thus denied a difference between male and female writing.

But women who write themselves - who write the body, as Cixous says - defy Man's history, or "truth". By speaking as themselves they aren't effacing their drives beneath Man's logical cage, sublimating it in private spaces. They are expressing it through a public space which cannot contain it and so visibly distort language as Man has always seen and known it. This is to say that when a woman speaks, she subverts, or re-inscribes, the Symbolic "with" herself. She challenges the Law of the Father; her very sentences ignore the Laws of language and making new laws, the laws of her body. It is, essentially, a different language which makes visible the differend in the sex-gender system. But Cixous is not a radical separatist feminist. She introduces the utopian notion of bisexuality, whereby female and male agency would be expressed in a new language, a new law. In Cixous' bisexual landscape, there would be a dynamic interplay between male and female discourse, an acceptance of both as fluid components of a larger totality. It involves the emergence of a new history, of feminist historiography which re-inscribes the female as an agent in history alongside males; hence a new Symbolic order. Cixous reminds us that we must avoid reduction or concessions to class, race and other struggles, for such diversions postpone the ubiquitous problem of female (re-?) establishment. That is, sex-gender problems operate through all those other struggles, and males and females can be productively united in those other struggles instead of complicating them, as is the case now.

The bisexuality Cixous proposes is, obviously, opposed to the culturally and historically constituted form of bisexuality we are familiar with. The present form of bisexuality is usually articulated in terms of the castration complex. In this theorization, men and women are defined differentially, with women defined as not Men, as not having the penis; the mirror of Woman is thus the inverse of the mirror of Man. Women are seen as castrated Men who has lost access to the Phallus, the Law of the Father, and thus each woman is a victim who recognizes herself in her mother and learns to hate her mother for being a victim. She must deny herself the mother as a love object - unlike the son who can persist loving an object of that same sex - and must displace her love onto the father so as to have access to the Phallus. Women must, then, compete with each other for the Phallus, territorializing their desire for the sake of male desire. Men, who compete with each other in terms of penis envy, are homophobic because they fear castration, which women are victims of. They fear to be recognized as homosexuals since that means loving what women love, regressing to a seemingly feminine subjectivity. And they fear any evidence of lesbianism, because that implies that women do not want the penis, that they are not Lacking. If the female doesn't want, doesn't Lack, the penis, then the penis is suddenly not an object of power.

Cixous here sees the male as needing to systematize woman's silence, as generally needing to theorize something for it to work. He needs to control difference, to reify it and exorcise what is not similar to himself so as to maintain his Possession. The male, consequently, has no bodily optimism, only transcendental, political, masochistic closure on Others, and has typed ways of dealing with deviants. He ex-nominates them, devaluing their subversive position, by, for example, saying gays cease to be male, and lesbians cease to be female. To maintain his Possession, the male perpetuates myths of female Lack in which the female is mystical, unknowable, a dark continent, a Medusa which cannot be safely explored and so, consequently, never questioned, or changed. In short, the female dark continent is unexplorable because it is constructed as dark by those who don't want its territory really known. It is the underside of the white continent of Man who wants to believe he and his Lack are important, the only "truth". He wants to make it culturally-universally significant, so silences all the particularities that contradict Him.

Yet Cixous emerges from this silence and says woman wants to be seen and heard, and is not dangerous. What is black, bloody, raw and dangerous is the violence she has made in her efforts to escape the places she has been shut inside. Unlike the male, who classifies everything in paranoia, Cixous sees the female as "flying" through language without needing any ground to return to. Females cannot be scared of castration, and so manage their ego more openly. Cixous here makes an important re-definition of women as "giving". She argues that they do not "give" in the Nietzschean sense, merely to rejuvenate males and maintain patriarchal order; they do not "give" in the hope that the Phallus will be "given" back, that the male will allow her continued to it through him. Rather, women are merely more fluid, whole without having set, known parts. She cannot feel loss, so she can give freely. She is less scared of merging with the Other, so delights in mutability. Cixous argues that in her new form of bisexuality, the woman should accept the mother, identify with her not as a victim, a subject, but as a source of pleasure, a body. She says: "Everything will be changed once woman gives woman to the other woman" meaning that the female will no longer hate and compete with other females for the Phallus. Cixous argues that if women are visible as something other than castrated Men - as not dependent on Men but as independent in themselves and interdependent with other men and women and other Others besides - then Men need not fear castration, and can be less paranoic about the loss of phallic power. Men can recognize and accept a new Symbolic system of power in which female subjectivity will change, and, since gender is differential, male subjectivity will also change. Males will not see themselves as Possessing, since women will no longer Lack, and so males will no longer fear castration, a loss of the Phallus, and will be more open to "fly" alongside women.

Cixous is at pains to show that the woman's body cannot be reduced into types by male theory, and says she must avoid tempting, compensatory sublimation by males. Modernism, for example, claiming to be progressive, in creating greater equality, sublimated women's desires through commodities, creating new needs to disguise her deeper ones. And modernist theory itself, including the Freudian and Lacanian theory Cixous draws on, reproduces the effects of patriarchy by theorizing it, by defining women by lack. But Cixous argues that we can't trace women as just wanting her "hole to be filled", she is not just driven by the cultural, dichotomous myth of wholeness with the male. She is whole in herself. Pregnancy and birth are not reducible to penis envy, narcissism, to paternal instinct, to a mystical-you-can't-understand-it patina, etc. If she is pregnant it does not mean she must also desire a family. Ideology coaxes her into this, not her desire. If woman wants to give birth, it's her business, her desire. Female desires aren't entirely constructed by, aligned with, the myths which describe her desire. Women have a pregnancy drive - like oral, anal, vocal and writing drives - which Man can deny, force to be sublimated, but cannot obliterate. And each women negotiates this drive differently. Absence of that desire isn't lack, or loss, or failure, since there is no perfect model for desires. The body is its own model for desires. If women want a male partner, it is not because she desires the phallus through him, or because monagomy is natural and inevitable. The woman wants man because he is another Other, she wants him as a part of all, as another love among the totality of all differences.

For Cixous, woman is the desire-that-gives. She thrills in becoming, in relishing in the Other. She is against hate in the Phallic sense of despising the Other which might threaten to change the self. Women have a non-profit economy of desire since they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. They can take pleasures in the Other without fear. The form of Cixous' article is significant here, for it mimes its content. Her writing is filled with defamiliarizing metaphors, which explode with overdetermined meaning. These are linguistic orgasms in which, I argue, there is a unity of disunity. For I read these metaphors as metonyms because, in the language of the body, something does not pretend to be something else, it becomes it. Like Lacan's l'hommelette, the self is not distinct from the environment, so there is no illusion of change, rather an actual metamorphosis. The male (fore-)play of signifiers becomes a pathetic act of failed masturbation which the medusa laughs at as her signifieds play themselves out in successful intercourse with the rest of the world. Cixous thus reclaims the feminine for women as an active, determined category from Men who have degraded it as a passive, distracted category through their fear of losing Phallic power. And in the process, Man becomes feminine in the sense he invented. He came up with the curse which the Medusa's gaze effects, which is to say she reifies him as he reified her with the gaze he gave her but never expected to give back.

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Cixous' article is valuable because it does not fall into the negative side of postmodernism: the fear of meaninglessness, the horror of the empty Sublime. As she says: "Let us not be trapped by an analysis still encumbered with the old automatisms. It's not to be feared that language conceals an invincible adversary, because it's the language of men and their grammar... woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of Man ... it is time for her to explode it, turn it around, seize it ... to invent for herself a language to get inside of" (257). Cixous regards that emptiness with the enthusiasm but not the arrogant presumption of modernism, anticipating that empty space in a liberating, self-reflexive, heuristic utopian gesture. She reclaims the repressed woman and the repressed space of the postmodern sublime in the same stride, through a materalist politics of pleasure which has been repressed by rationalist, idealist politics of sado-masochism. This politics of pleasure, the method, is what is utopian in the critical sense.

For while Cixous argues vehemently for women's writing, she says we cannot define it except as all that opposes, or surpasses, phallocentric discourse. To attempt to define it is, first, to imply that the woman Cixous describes is essential, when in fact it is a historically specific model posed against patriarchy as it now exists. Woman may become something else in the future - for example, if male and female bodies are both "giving" then to call women "giving" is regressive; she (indeed all human subjects) must be known in other ways - so any definition of Her writing can only ever be retrospectively descriptive. Also, to define it is still to repress its oppositional power, to limit the reaches of its subversion. Like Rosemary Jackson's idea of the fantastic, woman's writing it is a protean oppositional impulse based in psychological drives, whereby feminist writing - in all its various manifestations - is symptomatic of the repressed desires of the body. This definition is similar to the one Tom Moylan gives to the utopian impulse. It also implies Bloch's theories. For we should remember that utopian fiction is a necessary counterpart to utopian theory by articulating complex ideas in ways which the popular can easily understand and identify with. The metaphors in Cixous' article, the imagery and narrativization in Woman on the Edge of Time and The Female Man, are powerful theoretical fictions, strong images which can settle in a mind not familiar with that theory. Critical utopian acts of narrativization can be voiced both as an individual and a uniting act in the Gramscian sense - the voice of one person or a collective of people speaking for and unifying others with "common problems" - and though different utopians may read and use these texts in varying ways, they still publicly produce new images to counteract the homogenizing stereotypes which popular culture tries to impose on utopianism in general. Texts, like Cixous' produce new utopian figures, new Women: her essay is a medium in which women in the personal can speak in the political and where the home of women becomes not merely their household, but the entire culture in which they have been historically constituted. Her article is a shadow of a future which does not yet exist. In utopian fiction the shadow predicts the object that casts it. Unlike the projected utopian landscapes of the past, Cixous' utopia cannot be seen in whole. It is not a product, but a process, a method, a new set of Laws whose form is unknowable. As she says in her introduction: "what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project."

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In conclusion, perhaps it needs to be stressed that the utopian impulse, or in this case specifically the feminist impulse, doesn't exist at a textual level. In Cultural Studies, where writerly pluralism is acknowledged, texts have only a relative identity: a text can never be essentially anything since all meanings are provisional. Though writing an essay addressing male domination and circulating it may be a utopian/feminist act, a text can be (mis-)read by non-feminists and reinforce male domination - as often happens in the dominant literary canon. A utopian-feminist reading thus needs to be maintained, and since institutions maintain particular readings the utopian-feminist must try to institutionalize utopianism/feminism. Cixous' article, a published article labelled and studied as feminist at university enables us to provide a possible utopian-feminist reading. My reading is a utopian-feminist act, and makes the article a utopian-feminist text, at least for the duration of my reading: this tutorial keeps utopian-feminist processes going, not the text per se. If the text is alone it cannot even laugh to itself. It needs a reader. Only when we read the text as utopian-feminist can the medusa laugh and we laugh with her; for at that point we realize we have not died and turned to stone after all, but become more fluid and vital than we were.