Écriture féminine, or "women's writing", is a term coined by French feminist and literary theorist Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa".
And since the aforementioned 1975 when Cixous also founded women's studies at Vincennes, she has been as a spokeswoman for the group Psychanalyse et politique and a prolific writer of texts for their publishing house, des femmes.
")[13] American feminist critic and writer Elaine Showalter defines this movement as "the inscription of the feminine body and female difference in language and text.
"[14] Écriture féminine places experience before language, and privileges non-linear, cyclical writing that evades "the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system.
"[18] Almost everything is yet to be written by women about femininity: about their sexuality, that is, its infinite and mobile complexity; about their eroticization, sudden turn-ons of a certain minuscule-immense area of their bodies; not about destiny, but about the adventure of such and such a drive, about trips, crossings, trudges, abrupt and gradual awakenings, discoveries of a zone at once timorous and soon to be forthright.
[12] With regard to phallogocentric writing, Tong argues that "male sexuality, which centers on what Cixous called the "big dick", is ultimately boring in its pointedness and singularity.
[20] Some have found this idea difficult to reconcile with Cixous' definition of écriture féminine (often termed 'white ink') because of the many references she makes to the female body ("There is always in her at least a little of that good mother's milk.
[23] Associated with the maternal, feminine language (which Irigaray called parler femme, womanspeak)[24] is not only a threat to culture, which is patriarchal, but also a medium through which women may be creative in new ways.
Further criticisms of écriture féminine include what some claim is an essentialist view of the body and the consequential reliance on a feminism of 'difference' which, according to Diana Holmes, for instance, tends to "demonize masculinity as the repository of all that (at least from a post-'68, broadly Left perspective) is negative."