Proceedings of the 10th International Academic Conference on Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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WOMEN AND SPACE: Negotiating Female Agency in Helen Cixous’s “The Laugh of Medusa,” Anjali Sachedeva’s “All the Names They Used for God,” Linda N. Masi’s novel, Fine Dreams, and Le Ly Hayslip’s Biographical War Drama Film Heaven and Earth
Linda N. Masi
ABSTRACT:
Britannica Encyclopedia defines feminism as “the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes” (Britannica). The feminist canon includes a large body of literature that captures the power of women’s personal narratives as feminist testimony, which Helene Cixous’s essay entitled “The Laugh of Medusa” speaks to, as well as Anjali Sachdeva’s short story from her same titled story collection entitled “All The Names They Used For God” and the film Heaven and Earth, a visual representation of Le Ly Hayslip’s biographies entitled When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War, Woman of Peace. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Helene Cixous, a renowned French feminist philosopher, fiction writer and literary scholar, argues that the “Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as far from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement” (940). This paper will look at how Cixous argues that women should possess agency of their own bodies and experiences, their narratives, and their space in society, away from where males, under patriarchal societal systems, have relegated them to in the past. The paper will also seek to investigate the effectiveness of Cixous’s arguments on the diverse women folk and the impact of her arguments on the feminist canon. And lastly, the paper will interrogate and argue for how women negotiate agency in damnable spaces by exploring Sachdeva’s, Masi’s and Hayslip’s works.
keywords: Feminism, Agency, Public Space, Domestic Space, Patriarchy