The Feminine as Structural Problem 

Twelve years ago, I committed to a life in philosophy—knowing it meant poverty and prolonged adolescence. Years of it. Maybe forever, given the job market’s generosity toward philosophers! And my commitment hasn’t wavered. How could it? Philosophy does something almost nothing else can: whether I’m reading, writing, teaching, or lost in dialogue, it lifts me beyond the bounds of identity—beyond being a grad student with no real job, Iranian, cisgender, immigrant, daughter, sister—beyond every label pinned to me. But not in an erasing way; I am still each of them, yet for a moment, I become something more.  

What strikes me about my ongoing commitment to philosophy is that the deeper I go, the more feminist I become! Yet my experience of academic philosophy has largely disclosed the opposite: a discipline that solemnly declares its devotion to openness proves curiously unsettled by me as a woman—and, more precisely, by my perceived femininity. This discomfort is not a private or isolated experience unique to me; rather, the incompatibility of femininity with intellect appears to be deeply embedded in the discipline.

For instance, I recall a time when, as an undergraduate in the philosophy department, I dyed my hair pink and occasionally wore makeup—not to make a statement, nor provoke, but just because I felt like it! (Can you believe the audacity?!) However, that alone was enough to make me suspect in certain feminist circles: not only too feminine to be taken seriously, but apparently embarrassing enough to damage the reputation of the real feminists in the room! For me, this memory serves as one way of revealing that the idea of the philosopher—one that presupposes an incompatibility between femininity and intellect—is not held by men alone but is also internalized by many women, structuring how they come to experience not only others but also themselves within the discipline. 

What sharpens the frustration is that women need not perform femininity to encounter a lack of serious uptake in academic philosophy. In fact, if a woman does not embody these feminine-coded scripts, she is recast as the ‘bitch’—difficult, and too much. This figure signals a kind of sensitivity or volatility that marks her as a threat to the calm, rational, and detached posture philosophy continues to equate with rigor. In this way, we are compelled to ask: Is philosophical rigor so fragile that it falters in the presence of perceived womanhood? And must seriousness be stripped of gendered signifiers to count at all? If so, why do the reverse traits stereotypically-coded as masculine still pass as the neutral, sexless standard of rationality?

In response, I argue that the very norms that define “rigor” and “neutrality” as characteristic of rational reasoning are themselves products of patriarchal control—the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning (logos). Additionally, philosophy’s institutional unease with femininity follows from its commitment to dissolving obscurity within the structure of phallogocentrism, in which perceived womanhood is treated as a structural prohibition. As a way of resisting this structural prohibition, I propose a turn to l’écriture féminine, as articulated by Hélène Cixous: a mode of writing that intervenes in the formal conventions of philosophical reasoning—such as its claims to neutrality—in order to expose their gendered conditions of intelligibility.

In what follows, I offer a genealogical reversal of the Freudian model, treating it not as a neutral description of psychic life but as the symptomatic expression of a historically specific phallic economy. I show, first, that structural prohibition in Freud and later in Lacan does not simply restrain desire but constitutes gendered subjectivity in such a way that it appears ontologically given. This ontologizing operation, in turn, would stabilize the field of meaning in which gendered subjectivity is articulated, presenting its binary structure as necessary rather than produced. Once this constitutive operation is brought into view, I then argue that bodily desire is the condition of possibility of meaning itself, including the linguistic articulation of gendered subjectivity.

Grounding meaning and language in bodily desire destabilizes the ideal of neutral reason: what claims the status of disembodied rationality appears instead as an anatomie politique, a way of organizing thought around safeguarding phallic desire. In doing so, I take up Butler’s charge of essentialism against Cixous’s emphasis on the female body and argue that l’écriture féminine is not a naïve inversion of femininity and masculinity, but a practice that exceeds that binary and subverts phallogocentrism from within. Taken together, I conclude that philosophy’s “problem with women” is not the mere presence of women in its institutions, but the emergence of feminine modes of writing and embodiment as bearers of philosophical authority. 

I. Prohibition and the Preservation of Phallic Desire 

The development of phallogocentrism is best understood within a Freudian framework, which shows how power is internalized as desire prior to institutional formation, and how, as a result, patriarchy reproduces itself within the psyche through institutional structures. Freud’s account of female sexual development begins from a premise that already determines its outcome: Early childhood sexuality consists of partial drives—component impulses that are not intrinsically sexual but become sexual through their linkage to specific erogenous zones, the bodily sites that generate excitation. For instance, in the oral stage, the mouth organizes libidinal activity; in the anal stage, the anus performs this function. At this level, sexuality is multiple and non-hierarchical: no single organ governs the system.

The structural reorganization occurs in what he calls the phallic phase, where Freud presupposes an originally bisexual libidinal disposition. At this point, libidinal organization shifts from a distribution across multiple erogenous zones to genital centralization. This centralization, however, is asymmetrical. That is, although both sexes enter the phallic organization, only one genital organ is psychologically operative for each: “the male organ.” The decisive point, therefore, is not merely the emergence of genital primacy but the establishment of a single organ as the normative standard of sexual difference. Genital centralization takes the form of phallic centralization.

On Irigaray’s reading of Freud, the organization of sexual difference is structured around a phallic economy in which the clitoris is interpreted as merely a reduced form of the penis—“a little penis pleasant to masturbate.” Boy and girl enter the Oedipal drama with the same primary sexual orientation. This means that the differentiation of femininity from masculinity cannot come from different sexual starting points—it must be produced through how each sex emerges from this initial phallic sameness. The mechanism Freud proposes is this: “gender identification” happens when the sex of the prohibited object gets internalized as a prohibition. The manner of this identification is “incorporation“—the gender identity is established through the repression of that prohibited desire. 

What is relevant to my purpose here is Freud’s understanding of sexuality as primarily and universally phallic, such that the “vaginal phase” can only enter the theory in terms of lack. As Irigaray notes, the vaginal phase is introduced precisely as a replacement for “the forbidden hand,” functioning as the site where the penis finds pleasure after masturbation is prohibited. For example, the boy desires his mother but fears castration by the father for this desire. Thus, he renounces the mother and identifies with the father. However, while his identification with masculinity involves a lack—the loss of his primary prohibited object—the phallic desire itself is preserved. It is simply redirected to other women.

At this phase, Freud treats female sexuality as a receptacle, construing the vagina as devoid of autonomous pleasure, its function and value reduced entirely to the “lodging” it offers the male organ. The girl does not lose one object and redirects to another of equivalent status, as the boy does. She loses her own organ as a source of recognized pleasure and must reorganize her entire desire around what she does not have. A woman, therefore, experiences her own desire as the pursuit of this missing organ. She “attempts by every means available to appropriate that organ for herself.” For instance, desire for the father-husband who can “give” her one, desire for a child’s penis, and access to masculine cultural values. Each represents a compensatory route for the foundational lack. A woman’s desire gets structured entirely as the project of acquiring what she is defined as missing. This means that her desire has no positive content except negation and acquisition. 

If we accept that Freud’s treatment of the phallus as essentially sexually active—indeed, as libido itself—is neither dictated by biology nor constant across cultures and times, then that arbitrariness should begin, not end, the inquiry: what prior context already installs the phallus as active and the vagina as passive? As I see it, this priority is not external to Freud’s model but built into the very form of desire the phallus enacts. Drawing from Irigaray’s analysis, the penis itself is visibly discrete and passes through sharply identifiable states—erect or flaccid—the phallic economy comes to privilege what can be seen, isolated, touched, exposed, and measured. Thus,  desire is imagined as linear and object-directed precisely because sexual value is tethered to what can be displayed and compared.  

The erect penis is the central marker of its potency: a sign that can be ranked and tested. This yields the illusion of control. If potency can be confirmed by sight and comparison, satisfaction appears predictable and mastery attainable. The training starts early: boys compete over who “pees farthest,” and later over whose penis is “bigger,” “harder,” “stiffer.” Masculinity is calibrated through homosocial rivalry; the primary axis is man–man comparison, with women appearing only as the proof or the prize of a hierarchy already established between men. 

Conversely, the same mechanism that promises control also reveals its own vulnerability. Because potency is tied to a visible sign that is physiologically unstable, the system builds anxiety or “aphanisis” into its core. However, erection can fail, diminish, or arrive late. So, the more masculinity depends on hardness as the guarantee of power, the more it exposes itself to the fear of losing that very sign.

The upshot is that the structure of the Oedipal economy, which presents itself as the secure ground of sexual power essentially attributed to masculinity, is simultaneously a mechanism for producing male anxiety and fragility, precisely because its supposed power rests on a sign that is inevitably exposed to visible failure, thereby undermining its claim to patriarchal mastery.

II. The Ontological Force of Structural Prohibition 

Nonetheless, given the phallocentric frameworks developed by Lacanian theory and Irigaray’s reformulation of it, the status of a primary prohibition becomes crucial by virtue of the ontological force it acquires. What appears as natural law, rational necessity, or essential truth does so precisely by retroactively citing the very effects it has produced. That is to say, human consciousness operates within a regime of desire structured by prohibition: the encrypted loss of a forbidden love object ontologizes itself as the natural expression of an inner self, shaping one’s sense of personhood and, crucially, one’s gender identification.  

In Irigaray’s terms, this logic structures the representation of sexual difference itself: once female anatomy is theorized as a lack or deficiency, a woman’s relation to her own sexuality is necessarily organized around lack. Here, the representation of the female body is not merely descriptive; it structures the very conditions under which feminine subjectivity can appear to itself as a sexual subject. This Freudian prohibition, then, does not simply repress a pre-existing desire; it generates the very structure of desire itself and subsequently effaces that generative operation, appearing instead as the discovery of what was always already natural. 

To illustrate, Éliette Abécassis’s novel La Répudiée dramatizes how lack is lived and then re-naturalized as an intrinsic feminine relation to the self. The novel situates its protagonist within a Hasidic community in which women’s roles are tightly determined by religious law: their mission of procreation, their duty as wives, and their strict adherence to norms of purity and modesty. Procreation is presented as the theological foundation of marriage: marriage is a “divine commandment,” while celibacy is condemned as a “failure toward the community,” since man is created “in the image of God…that is to say, male and female.” A woman’s value is said to be granted so that she may “participate indirectly in the life of the Torah” by preparing food, cleaning the home, and “bringing light into the heart of the household.” The protagonist’s subjectivity is thus mediated by ritual prescriptions that she comes to internalize as defining her. 

In this setting, the body is not simply biological but a site where prohibition, desire, and religious meaning intersect: men’s bodies are expressive, mobile, ecstatic, authorized; women’s bodies are restrained, hidden, disciplined, controlled. Abécassis describes Hasidic men «dansant ensemble, les uns contre les autres, leurs corps ondulant dans des cadences folles». This movement is public, visible, and holy— functions as a ritual. Rachel, the protagonist, observes her husband Nathan: «Je ne pouvais détacher mes yeux du danseur ivre, du danseur fou: Nathan, mon mari, les yeux fermés, pris par la danse, ébloui par la Présence». Here, Rachel sees his body become a channel for divine presence (la Présence), an instrument of holiness, while simultaneously experiencing her own positioning—along with that of the other woman—as «derrière, pressées les unes contre les autres…nous ne dansons pas».

What this scene makes visible, then, is how a historically contingent distribution of corporeal agency hardens into apparent necessity. The opposition the novel draws between men’s ecstatic movement and women’s stillness inscribes phallic privilege into the very grammar of bodily possibility. In this sense, the Freudian model of femininity does not acquire ontological weight in spite of its contractedness but through it. Ritual repetition presents a particular ordering of bodies—who moves, who watches, who mediates the sacred—as if it were the only imaginable way of inhabiting the world. 

Lacan radicalizes this Freudian logic by showing how symbolic prohibition generates the very structure of language itself. The repeated coding of male bodies as conduits of transcendence and female bodies as custodians of modesty renders phallocentric desire both sayable and thinkable—it establishes the very categories through which consciousness apprehends embodied experience. For Lacan, self-consciousness as agentive ego assumes what he terms a “fictional direction” (une direction fictive) prior to any conscious self-determination—a méconnaissance structurally antecedent to recognition. The subject’s misalignment with the Real is not contingent but constitutive: the “I” approaches its own becoming (devenir) only asymptotically, perpetually failing to coincide with itself.

Once this process takes place within an order that already codes men as those who move and mediate, and women as those who are held in reserve, these little realities (ce peu de réalité) come to feel like inner facts. What is lived as immediate self-knowledge—e.g., “this is simply who I am, how my gender feels”—is not an essential truth of the self, but the outcome of a prior symbolic structuring. The same rituals that assign bodies to certain positions do not remain visible as rituals; their effects persist while their contingency is forgotten. What has been produced over time is then taken up as if it had always already belonged to the subject. For instance, in La Répudiée, Rachel does not begin by feeling that she “is the kind of woman who does not dance.” She learns it by not dancing; after enough repetition, the prohibition becomes indistinguishable from her own sense of self. 

III. Repetition as the Condition of Communicability 

We can now see that phallocentrism does not operate solely at the level of sexuality; it functions as a linguistic and symbolic structure that orders meaning and constitutes differentiated subject positions. Meaning depends on recognizability across instances: only what can appear again as the same can be taken up as meaningful. This recognizability is what makes communication possible, since a sign can be transmitted only if it is already identifiable as the same across contexts. Communication, understood as semantic transmission, can thus be seen as secondary to the repetition that stabilizes signs in the first place. 

If communication is semantic transmission, then repetition is its necessary condition: only what can return as the same can be communicated. What cannot be repeated cannot be transmitted and so cannot count as meaningful within that economy. Meaning is therefore treated as prior to context—something to be decoded and unified—because only the already-stabilized is granted legibility. Specifically, this view treats meaning as determinable in advance, capable of rendering an otherwise alienating context intelligible by organizing its disparate parts into a single, coherent whole. What makes this intelligibility feel secure is a causal reflex: recurrence is taken to do so because it expresses an underlying identity, such that repetition is read as the effect of a pre-existing cause. Once a pattern becomes recognizable and predictable, it is retroactively treated as evidence of what was supposedly “there” all along. 

Consider who is immediately recognizable as “a philosopher.” No single individual establishes this figure. Rather, particular ways of speaking, writing, dressing, and comporting oneself recur across classrooms, conferences, and publications. Over time, this recurrence renders these traits familiar. As they become familiar, they also become predictable, forming a recognizable pattern within the context. Within a phallocentric economy of meaning, predictability is mistaken for explanation: the pattern produced by repetition is taken as proof of an essence that precedes it, and this supposed essence then functions as the cause that authorizes further repetitions. Meaning is assumed to be prior to context and merely stabilized through repetition; consequently, only what can be communicated—understood here as what can be predicted and generalized—comes to count as meaningful. Thus, you are not initially recognized as a philosopher because you are one, but only insofar as you approximate an imaginary order that, through repetition, fixes how a philosopher is meant to look.

But again, what does a philosopher look like in such an imaginary order? Learning from the pink-hair episode in my undergraduate years, when I was assigned, for the first time, to my long-dreamed role as main instructor for Introduction to Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, I found myself considering how even my appearance might shape students’ willingness to trust my invitation to think critically and challenge their assumptions. Assuming I might need to approximate the stereotypical image of a philosophy professor at least initially, I asked ChatGPT the following question: What should I wear to lecture if I want to signal that I take the material seriously without implying that I take myself too seriously? The answer offered nothing unfamiliar—only what had long been part of my wardrobe: “Consider a structured blazer paired with straight-leg trousers and flat shoes.”

Here, “colorless,” “structured,” and “flatness” function as signifiers (S) that organize the meaning of being a philosopher. Meaning is not the natural output of any single signifier; it is an effect(s) produced through relations among signifiers within a symbolic field. At the metonymic level, a particular signifier S₁ is expected to occupy a discursive slot. For instance, “philosopher” is the subject of predicates such as rigorousness. Yet, depending on its relation to neighboring signifiers, another signifier S₂—such as “intellect,” or “abstraction”—can take its place.

With this in mind, if subject positions differ, why does the image of “being a philosopher” in the imagination of first-time students so often coincide with what mainstream academic philosophers themselves recognize as the profession’s normative ideal? This question becomes more pressing when we further consider the tension between the expected S₁ (the master signifier that anchors meaning) and the occupying S₂ (the particular subject who fills that position). When the embodied instructor does not fully coincide with the expected S₁, a new signification is produced. This is precisely the mechanism of metaphor: Substitution transforms meaning.

The response is that S₁ need not appear explicitly to remain operative. Signifiers function through adjacencies as chains of association. Meaning slides along links such as “philosopher” → “rigor” → “abstraction” → “neutrality.” Even when the signifier “philosopher” is not directly invoked, its associated predicates circulate and organize expectation. What is absent at the level of explicit articulation can remain structurally active. Repression does not eliminate the signifier; it displaces it. It persists as a determining absence that continues to structure the field of intelligibility.

This is why, when I earlier asked what philosophy’s problem with women is, I did not mean a defect internal to the discipline, or one imposed by men. I meant a structural problem arising from a phallic economy of signification in which the phallus functions as the signifier of desire and lack. Here, while masculinity aligns with “having the phallus,” the feminine position is with “being phallus,” i.e., occupying the place of the Other’s desire.

And given that philosophical authority is organized around such a signifier, coded as neutral abstraction, recognition as a philosopher requires occupying that masculine position. For subjects marked as feminine, the visible embodiment of sexual difference risks being read as particularity or insufficient neutrality. The issue is not clothing or style but the structural relation between embodiment and symbolic authority. The philosopher image becomes the site where authority equals disembodiment, disembodiment equals neutrality, and neutrality equals legitimacy, such that sexual difference must be effaced to count as a philosopher.

IV. Femininity Under Structural Prohibition 

In the phallic economy, meaning is produced by stabilizing a sign: an image, word, or concept that can stand in for different instances across time. This process relies on a visual logic and a hierarchy between signifier and signified: an image or form must be detached from its specific context so that it can be recognized, repeated, and generalized. Philosophical traditions from Plato onward reproduce this model by treating the body and its appearances as mere portals to a “higher” truth: only what can be seen, isolated, and subjected to binary distinctions  (subject/object, active/passive) counts as intelligible. 

Contrary to this phallic economy, female autoeroticism, as Irigaray describes it, defies this ordering because it is continuous and plural rather than discrete. The two lips of the vulva are in constant contact; pleasure is mediated through touch rather than sight; there is no moment at which a single “sign”  can be abstracted and deferred. The predominance of the visual—and of discriminating and individualizing form—is therefore foreign to female eroticism. Within a system that demands visual markers and temporal deferral to produce meaning, female autoeroticism appears unrepresentable: it cannot be predicted, isolated, or rendered as an object for generalization, so it is reduced to lack. This is why, if the phallocentric structure holds, the “real” meaning of female autoeroticism cannot be identified: it resists the very mechanism by which such a structure generates meaning. 

I do not intend to treat female anatomy as inherently meaningful, since I reject the premise of a teleology prior to bodily desire. The point, rather, is to show how its opacity and difference, simply by not operating according to the phallic model, are misread as lack. This “lack” acquires ontological force insofar as what cannot be stabilized as a single sign is registered instead as excess or overflow; an overabundance that cannot be fully captured by the symbolic order and is therefore pushed to the margins as noise, disorder, or threat. Femininity, in this sense, names what resists univocal meaning: what multiplies signification, introduces ambiguity and contradiction, and brings rhythm and intensity where the system demands stable identity. 

This does not mean that femininity expresses an essence or defines womanhood: femininity is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a woman. Many women are feminine, and many women are not; femininity and womanhood are therefore logically independent. Femininity does not map cleanly onto womanhood; it circulates instead as a recognizable cluster of features across a multiplicity of genders. Femininity nonetheless has meaning—not as an inner essence or natural truth, but as a socially legible configuration of embodied and expressive practices, the kinds of cues through which bodies are gendered in ordinary life: styles of grooming and dress, vocal and gestural modulation, patterns of emotional display, posture, and movement. Therefore, phallocentrism names a general regime of intelligibility: it governs not only how sexuality is represented, but how anything becomes thinkable, sayable, and recognizable as meaning in the first place. 

V. L’écriture féminine from Within Prohibition 

The question that follows, then, is whether any alternative remains for subverting phallogocentric discourse, once its effects have been naturalized as the very conditions of reason, language, and subjectivity. Here, I suggest that Hélène Cixous’s account of l’écriture féminine in «Le Rire de la  Méduse» opens a way out of this circular determination. By insisting on a parallel between text and body, Cixous shows that the living body always exceeds its symbolic coding, not by standing outside structure, but by marking what that structure cannot fully absorb. The body thus persists as a constitutive remainder, a surplus that the phallic economy must continually disavow in order to maintain its claim to completeness. 

Here, I read Cixous as constructing l’écriture féminine under two linked conditions that neither ignore the ontological force of the phallocentric structure nor leave us trapped within it. Condition (1): She accepts the Freudian–Lacanian claim that subjectivity and desire are structured in and by the signifier. She does not deny the ontological force of phallocentrism but takes phallogocentric language—linear, logical, unified—as her necessary point of departure. Crucially,  she treats “woman” not as an essence but as a gender position produced and continually reproduced as lack through the repetitive operations of phallic structure. Condition (2): Following Derrida,  she rejects the hierarchy that would place bodily desire on one side and the construction of meaning on the other—as if desire existed first, and language merely expressed it afterward. Instead,  meaning is not a pre-given content that writing transports. Writing generates multiple effects:  traces, displacements, intensities, disruptions. “Meaning” is just one of these effects, not writing’s predetermined goal or telos. 

Nevertheless, if desire is formed in language (not prior to it), and if writing generates effects beyond stable meanings, then l’écriture féminine cannot mean simply expressing a pre-existing “feminine essence” that exists outside phallogocentric structure. There is no pure femininity waiting to be unveiled. Instead, l’écriture féminine names a practice of writing from the body within phallogocentric constraints—where desire is formed, split, and permitted to exceed the positions that structure assigns. This is why Cixous’s intervention is not an escape from phallocentrism but a disruption from within. As she writes: 

«Il ne faut plus que le passé fasse l’avenir. Je ne nie pas que les effets du passé  sont encore là. Mais je me refuse à les consolider en les répétant ; à leur prêter une  inamovibilité équivalente à un destin ; à confondre le biologique et le culturel. Il est urgent d’anticiper».

In the above passage, I take Cixous’s use of anticiper to mean not simply to foresee, but to project and create a future that does not repeat the phallic past. This is possible because desire is not fixed. As said, L’écriture féminine is grounded in bodily desire, and bodily desire is mutable, context-dependent. When a desire is repeatedly inscribed within a given context, that context renders it legible and intelligible, and eventually secures it as a linguistic structure. Context stabilizes meaning through iteration. 

Crucially, Cixous refuses to define l’écriture féminine as a determinate style or technique. To do so would be to treat desire as fixed essence, sliding back into the essentialism at work in  Freud and Lacan. Instead, l’écriture féminine names an ongoing movement, an act de son propre mouvement—a practice in which a woman does not take her bodily desire as limited to a unified meaning of womanhood, but in living and writing as a woman creates new meanings for what “woman” can be.

This is why Cixous’s injunction is prescriptive rather than descriptive: «Écris-toi: il faut que ton corps se fasse entendre. Alors jailliront les immenses ressources de l’inconscient.» The reflexive écris-toi—“write yourself,” not “write about yourself”—targets self-consciousness produced within phallocentric rituals.

 L’écriture féminine operates where women have been positioned in contradictions: guilty of having desires and guilty of not having them, guilty of being frigid and guilty of being “too hot,” guilty of being a mother and not enough. This structure has censored women’s relationship to their sexuality and forces, keeping bodily territories under seal. Writing can tear women from this structure because writing generates effects rather than expresses meanings. To write from the body is to de-censor desire, to return to women their goods, pleasures,  organs—not as essence but as capacity to inscribe femininity otherwise. 

But how can l’écriture féminine exceed structural prohibition if it operates within that structure? If repetition is what makes bodily desire communicable in the first place, how can writing exceed the phallocentric structure when writing itself depends on that very repetition? The answer is that repetition in writing contains its own opening. For any sign to function as language, it must be iterable—repeatable across different contexts. But the moment a sign can be repeated, it can be detached from its original context. This detachability is not a secondary feature; it is built into what makes the sign work at all.

Consider “She’s emotional, he’s rational”—this functions as gendered common sense precisely because it has been repeated enough to become recognizable. Yet this same repeatability means the sentence can appear in an HR document that reinforces bias, or in a critical essay that exposes that bias. The structure that secures gendered meaning through repetition cannot prevent the same repetition from enabling recontextualization. Writing does not escape phallocentric structure; rather, the condition that allows phallocentric structure to stabilize meaning (iterability) is the same condition that prevents it from achieving closure. L’écriture féminine works within this gap—not outside the structure, but at the point where the structure’s own mechanism (repetition) exceeds what any single context can contain. 

In the case of academic philosophy, the problem is not that a feminine-coded philosopher “lacks” rigor or fails to match the norm. The prohibition is structural: even when she fully conforms to the expected forms of argument, tone, and presentation, her very body and voice continue to signify the lack that phallocentric reason presupposes. The more she strives to inhabit those norms, the more her presence is perceived as a threat. When she philosophizes, she does not simply join an already neutral discourse; she exposes, in practice, that “rigor” and “neutrality” were gendered from the start. In attempting to embody philosophical rigor, she inevitably begins to undo the very gendered meanings that first positioned her as its negation. 

Similarly, Rachel’s suicide at the end of La Répudiée should be read in this register. It does not reveal a pre-existing “death drive” or an essentially self-destructive femininity; it condenses the impossibility of the position she has been assigned. Once every avenue of desire that does not conform to phallic norms is foreclosed, the act of killing herself appears to her as the only coherent way of being faithful to what she takes to be her truth. In Lacan’s terms, the structure has so organized the field of possible acts that even this final refusal is lived as the realization of what she “really” is. 

The activity of l’écriture féminine as an act of transgression is thus situated within these bodily negations. However, Cixous’s emphasis on bodily desire is not vulnerable to Butler’s objection concerning the essentialization of the maternal body. While Cixous, like Irigaray, insists on the materiality of feminine embodiment, she avoids biologizing womanhood by refusing to collapse it into anatomical determinism. Her concept of jouissance—pleasure beyond phallic economy—is grounded in bodily experience yet remains irreducible to any fixed corporeal schema. This becomes clear when Cixous writes:  

«J’écris ceci en tant que femme vers les femmes. Quand je dis ‘la femme,’ je parle  de la femme en sa lutte inévitable avec l’homme classique; et d’une femme-sujet  universelle, qui doit faire advenir les femmes à leur(s) sens et leur histoire».

The tension in this formulation is deliberate: “woman” (la femme) names both a singular collective struggle against “classical man” and a universal subject that must bring women (plural)  to their multiple meanings and histories. She distinguishes between «les femmes partageant UNE signification/direction collective» and «les femmes ayant PLUSIEURS significations/directions individuelles»—women share a collective struggle while embodying multiple individual trajectories. 

Finally, what is «propre» to femininity in Cixous’s sense is not a biological essence but a structural position: “woman” names those subjected to phallic prohibition, independent of biological sex yet without erasing its material stakes. She figures this body as “without end, without ‘tip,’ without principal ‘parts’… a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects, but a moving and changing ensemble, an unlimited cosmos that Eros travels without rest, immense astral space not organized around one sun more-star than the others.”

Such a body cannot be gathered around a single phallic center. Correspondingly, l’écriture féminine cannot be a fixed, “naturally feminine” style; it names a practice that follows the displacements of desire, loosening the phallic economy from within rather than denouncing it from an imaginary outside. “Womanhood,” in this register, is the position of those interdicted by the phallogocentric order: not defined by anatomy alone, but by subjection to this prohibition and by the ways in which a materially situated body both bears and exceeds it.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.