L'ecriture Feminine

Discovering the écriture féminine has largely been about centering women’s bodies and women’s experiences in writing.  But there are problems with this particular aspect of feminist theory, namely, it’s tendency to essentialize about the relationship between gender and style.  According to Cixous the female body and female sexuality have been negated and repressed by centuries of male power. For her, a recuperation of the female body is, in fact, the main source of ecriture feminine. She argues that the relationship between femininewriting and the female body lies in the heterogeneity and multiplicity of female sexuality. A woman's body is endowed with a greater number of erogenous zones than man's: lips, breasts, vagina, clitoris; her entire body is a sexual organ, whereas male sexuality tends to be much more monolithic, focused primarily upon the penis. For example, Irigaray’s asserts that women’s experience cannot be depicted using the linear, logical mode that dominates male writing.   It comes awfully close, in my opinion, to rooting women’s distinctiveness in stereotype:  Men are logical, linear, and mundane.  Women are non-linear, emotional, jouissant, poetic.  To reify those categories is to at least partially deny the social conditioning that codes rationality, order, and science as masculine and feelings and all that shit as feminine. As female sexuality is plural in its capacity for multiple and heterogeneous pleasures, so feminine writing transcends univocality, linearity, and the fixity which comprise "phallic" discourse.

 Women frame their requests in a less assertive way because that is how we are taught to enter the world:  don’t be too aggressive, don’t be arrogant, don’t bother people, don’t make people upset, don’t step on anyone’s toes, don’t don’t don’t.  But even though women tend to undersell themselves, that doesn’t mean that they are incapable of using commanding rhetoric when the occasion calls for it or that they will automatically compromise their ideals in order to avoid conflict or confrontation.

 In "The Language of the Brag", a poem that might serve as an early manifesto, she writes of the physical act of giving birth as some kind of Whitmanesque celebration of the self and the written word. It's an early indication, perhaps, of the fascinating, and complicated, relationship in Olds's work between life and art. Olds exhibits her pride in her body in the next stanza as she states, “I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body, some heroism, some American achievement… I have stood by the sandlot and watched the boys play.” She wants to do something that even men would be astonished by. She examines the achievement of giving birth as if to say “ ha! Men try this because I bet you can’t!” Olds mentions Walt Whitman in last stanza, stating, “I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman, I have done this thing, I and the other women this exceptional act with the exceptional heroic body,” because men poets had the vision of speaking of themselves in terms of 
She shows empowerment through the woman’s body by speaking on the miracle of giving life.