Writing the Desire that Fire Bore: Emergent Motherhood in Hélène Cixous's The Book of Promethea

ABSTRACT

Understood as a socially expected and historically significant event in most societies, motherhood signifies women’s adulthood, a time of life shaped by matrimony and child-rearing within heteropatriarchy. Motherhood may be a cause for celebration for women who identify with their procreative role; however, as a normative institution it limits the range of our understanding of potential maternal experiences. In the face of such oppressive maternal codes, I propose an emergent motherhood: a nonbiological, nonessentialist, and inherently queer concept that challenges fundamental assumptions about maternity and empowers women to sound their own politics of procreative desire through embodied practices of writing. I anchor my argument on the French psychoanalytic feminist standpoint that exposes the unconscious role of language in women’s ideological suppression, particularly as explicated in Hélène Cixous’s work. I take Cixous’s The Book of Promethea—primarily a work of love relishing the complexities of relationships—as an exemplar of a woman writing with the body to experience the creative, political, and poetic joys of linguistic expression that an emergent motherhood offers.

KEYWORDS:

• Embodied writing
• French feminism
• haptics
• Hélène Cixous
• motherhood
• poetics
• procreation
• queer desire

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2015 National Communication Association Convention in Las Vegas as part of a roundtable focused on the “Rhetorical Reconceptions of Motherhood.” The author thanks the editors and reviewers of Women’s Studies in Communication for refining this work. She also acknowledges Dr. Dana Cloud for encouraging this work, Dr. Scott Stroud for his pragmatic advice in the revision process, and Marnie Ritchie for sharing Cixous’s fervor for embodied writing.

Notes

When referring to the text, I italicize Promethea. I leave the formatting for the character as is.

A reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) antiestablishment approach to the formation of subjectivity in A Thousand Plateaus. Becoming is a turning in, a folding back into oneself to produce “nothing other than itself” (p. 238), which implies neither a regression nor a teleological progression associated with transcendent words such as being. Deleuze and Guattari describe becoming as a verb, which can be a lateral, seamless, asymmetrical, acausal ongoingness of force encounters among bodies. Because of its processual nature, becoming “does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equaling,’ or ‘producing’ (p. 239). Becoming enfolds exteriority into bodies (what immanence implies as withinness) as they affect one another’s actions or transpire their retardations.

Another nod to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notes on a how rhizome works/becomes: Haptic movements are acausal, seamless, autonomous, and antiestablishment, while optic ones are subservient to the state and governmentality.

A reference Cixous makes to masculinist writing and discourse in The Laugh of the Medusa.