For the French Feminists, the question is not necessarily whether one is a man or a woman, but rather: of which forces is one comprised? What forces is one capable of encountering, possessing, and enacting? Both masculine and feminine forces exist,... [more]

For the French Feminists, the question is not necessarily whether one is a man or a woman, but rather: of which forces is one comprised? What forces is one capable of encountering, possessing, and enacting? Both masculine and feminine forces exist, and it is not the form of the organism that should bear the burden of gender, but the form of the force. Enmeshed deeply in the practices of Deconstruction, writers such as Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous do not overtly pedastalize the feminine over the masculine -- rather, they seek to traverse the line between these forces, to partake of both or integrate both. French Feminists denounce the dominating masculine or 'phallic' force only to the extent that it reduces the multiplicity and heterogeneity of language and life to its simple set of ordered oppositions. As it closes the gaps through which other voices might otherwise be heard, it must be displaced. The masculine voice should not be suppressed, but also not allowed to silence; the voice may be heard, but as one voice among many, without unifying, totalizing, or even organizing the multiplicity that an encounter with the feminine produces. Much of the work French Feminists have done involves a confrontation with Freud. Freud considered female sexuality to be predicated on a pure lack, the absence of the phallus; he saw feminine desire as nothing more than the longing to fill this absence. Against this soldering of the feminine to the masculine, of absence to a superior presence, the French Feminists insist on the excessive nature of feminine sexuality -- it is this excess that opens into multiplicity, a multiplicity ungoverned by a single phallic principle. [show less]