Poststructural feminism emphasizes "the contingent and discursive nature of all identities",[1] and in particular the social construction of gendered subjectivities.
[2] Like post-structuralism itself, the feminist branch is in large part a tool for literary analysis, but it also deals in psychoanalysis and socio-cultural critique,[3] and seeks to explore relationships between language, sociology, subjectivity and power-relations as they impact upon gender in particular.
Like many other feminist theorists, Cixous believes that human sexuality is directly tied to how people communicate in society.
Through the awareness of such flaws, as well as the invention of new ways of expression, women can overcome the obstacles that are constructed by what she labels a phallocentric discourse.
"It will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination.
Born on June 24, 1941, in Bulgaria Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist, and (most recently) novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s.
Cixous first uses this term in her essay, The Laugh of the Medusa in which she asserts: Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence," the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word "impossible" and writes it as "the end.
Freud's analysis of gender roles and sexual identity concluded with separate male (Oedipus) and female (Electra) theories of which Cixous was critical.
[8] The "abject" exists accordingly somewhere between the concepts of subject and object, representing taboo elements of the self barely separated off in a liminal space.