I speak as I orgasm - timidly

“I am angry, I am hurt, I work with an incompleteness so profound, with a mind so fragmented that nothing I write in this man’s world will ever be complete because my words will fail me forever.” - an exhausted female student

Woman’s voice is tethered to that quivering, trembling sense of self that pulls her apart, and detaches her from her sexual being. Language is phallic - it expresses those sentiments best that are male, while feminine experiences, thoughts and feelings are only littered here and there. Eventually they seep into cracks and crevices of that male language and remain forever hidden and inaccessible. When female experience itself becomes secondary, how far can language accommodate those experiences which are both sexual and feminine? An invisible trail connects language with sexual expression and sexuality with the act of writing- writing that lies beyond the textual, beyond the intelligible. A phallic language cannot express femininity in any form- be it sexual or otherwise- because womanhood is as fluid as gender itself. It defies all singularity, homogeneity and all categories. How then can one define femininity when there is no one kind of it? Heterosexual sex and the imaginary that governs it is foreign to women - thus it is entirely alienating for the female sexual experience. Any concrete imagination for that matter, that does not allow conversation beyond language, is most incomprehensible for women.

Sexual expression for women is most pleasurable, most intimate when it is like a conversation with the self - reflective and introspective. Women’s sexual form, their two lips that forever touch each other, enable them to remain in touch with oneself and function as an extension of such a conversation. Feminine autoeroticism is thus fundamental to female sexual pleasure and an explorative reinvention of her body. Such an engagement with the self is so important and so pleasurable owing to the complexities and whirlpool-ness of female sensuality which is perhaps best understood by woman herself. One can argue that a whirlpool best describes feminine sexuality - its hollow nothingness - the hole, the darkness, the empty void, and thus, nothing. Yet, everything because it is so beyond confinement and so multiple. “The mystery that woman represents in a culture claiming to count everything, to number everything by units, to inventory everything as individualities. She is neither one nor two. Rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person, or as two. She resists all adequate definition. Further, she has no "proper" name. And her sexual organ, which is not one organ, is counted as none. The negative, the underside, the reverse of the only visible and morphologically designatable organ: the penis.” (Irigary, 1985) It is the sensuality that is contained in every sensual tingling, beyond the clitoris - the penis reverse - which overflows and floods the body. The possibilities are so expansive and multiple, yet so limited and defined by the singular imagination of the heteronormative patriarchal world order. Women feel not what their sexuality makes it possible for them to feel, but what is expected of them to feel. In upholding the differential sexual freedom, in limiting the potentialities of female sexual expression, in keeping women happy with fragments and fake orgasms, the social order stays intact. Indeed, women’s sexual repression is imperative for the world to go on as it does - in a state of complete apathy towards her body. Through her own self censoring, the sexual language of the feminine is mutilated and meddled with. It is a censoring of pleasure itself.

Julia Kristeva writes, "Sexual difference- which is at once biological, physiological, and relative to production- is translated by and translates a difference in the relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social contract; a difference, then, in the relationship to power, language, and meaning.” The ability to express connects the power of selfhood with the power of being- of knowing one’s heart’s mother tongue and in being allowed to speak it out loud, unabashedly. “Masculinist and feminist theorists alike have toyed with the idea of a culturally determined body language which translates articulations of the body into that body of articulated terminology call language” (Gilbert and Gubar, 1985) Is this language determined, as it is argued to be, by the corporeality of existence, another patriarchal imposition? Monique Wittig in her novel “Les Guérillères” passionately maims language which she argues is entirely a rejection of the female voice. “Men have expelled you from the world of symbols and yet they have given you names, they have called you slave, you unhappy slave. Masters, they have exercised their right as master. They write, of their authority to accord names, that it goes back so far that the origin of language itself may be considered an act of authority emanating from those who dominate…the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you.”[1] Masculine occupation of language, is an extension of the corrosive patriarchal project that has sought to conquer and occupy female bodies. Women’s arbitrary exclusion from the arena of writing, of speech and from history itself makes it rather tedious for them to reclaim and reconstruct linguistic theory to accomodate themselves in it. Thus, the feminist preoccupation with giving the pen to the woman so she could write her own story (if not speak it out loud), and reclaim her narrative from centuries of patriarchal appropriation is an ethical concern that seeks to save language itself from the phallus.

Women’s writing has been written about in peculiar ways - women’s writing is never just writing, in fact, it is barely just textual. It is a purgatory act that splurges out the masculinity of language little by little. Elaine Showalter describes it as “a revolutionary linguism, an oral break from the dictatorship of patriarchal speech.” Other interventions that have produced what has been referred to as “a body of semi-mystical theory about language” have connected language with the woman’s body - where the womb becomes a mouth and nipples become inkwells. Such a reinvention of language counters the imagination of it in terms of the pen being a metaphorical penis. Linguistic differences marked by experiential differences owing to one’s gender identity, initiate the need to work with women’s writing as a separate category of literature that re-engages with words and renegotiates women’s terms with modes of expression.

“Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst-burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts?” (Cixious, 1975)

One cannot help but draw parallels between these ‘luminous torrents’ of passionate writing with an overpowering sense of outburst emanating from one’s body, from one’s sexual being, like an orgasmic flooding of long repressed acts- that of writing, of self-pleasuring. Later in the essay, Cixious writes “...Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished for writing, because you didn't go all the way; or because irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty- so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.” (Cixious, 1975)

Writing or any form of linguistic expression is an outburst for the feminine subject perhaps because language, masculinist as it is, is a prison that needs to be stormed. It is a vessel that ought to be emptied out only to be refilled with the missing whispers and screams of the stifled woman- it must accommodate her words (constructed by herself and for herself) as well as her moans (those that are for herself, as an expression of her uncensored self-pleasuring). Language could perhaps then redeem itself just a little bit. 

 Works Cited

Cixous, Hélène, et al. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875–93.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality.” New Literary History, vol. 16, no. 3, 1985, pp. 515–43.

Irigaray, L. (1985). This sex which is not one.

Suleri, S., & Spivak, G. C. (1988). In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. Modern Language Notes, 103(5), 1201.

Annas, Pam, et al. “Writing As Women.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 1, 1984, pp. 38–43.

Norman, Renee. “SECTION I: Women Writing Women.” Counterpoints, vol. 146, 2001, pp. 26–42.=