Hélène Cixous

Hélène Cixous (born 5 June 1937 in Oran, French Algeria) is a French feminist theorist, novelist, and playwright whose work helped define late-twentieth-century continental feminism. Raised in a German-Jewish and Sephardic family during the Vichy years and the Algerian War, she carried the experience of colonial violence, Jewish displacement, and multilingual exile into all of her writing.

After studying English at the Sorbonne and earning a doctorate on James Joyce, she co-founded the experimental Université de Paris VIII at Vincennes in 1968 and established Europe's first doctoral program in women's studies there in 1974. She also helped launch the journal Poétique with Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov.

Her 1975 manifesto The Laugh of the Medusa called for écriture féminine, a writing that would inscribe the female body and unconscious into language without surrendering to phallocentric form. Together with Sorties, the essay reshaped feminist literary theory and was widely translated, anthologized, and taught in Anglophone universities.

Alongside theory she has produced more than seventy books of fiction, autobiography, and drama, including Dedans (1969, Prix Médicis), The Book of Promethea, and stage works for Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil such as L'Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk. Long associated with Jacques Derrida, she has been awarded the Légion d'honneur and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize.

The feminine name Hélène is the French form of Greek Helénē, of disputed origin but most often linked to helene meaning "torch" or to selēnē, "moon," both suggesting brightness. Long associated with Helen of Troy, the name carries a literary aura that suits a writer who has spent her life rethinking how women speak.