Hélène Cixous

Hélène Cixous (b. 1937, Oran, Algeria) is a French feminist writer, playwright, and philosopher born to a French-German-Jewish father and a Sephardic Spanish-German-Jewish mother, who grew up in colonial Algeria. She studied literature in France and received her Doctorat d'État in 1968. She co-founded the experimental Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes) following the events of May 1968 and established there the first doctoral program in Women's Studies in France.

Her essay Le Rire de la Méduse (The Laugh of the Medusa, 1975) is among the foundational texts of feminist theory in the French tradition, calling for a "feminine writing" (écriture féminine) that would disrupt the phallogocentric order of language by introducing the specificity of the woman's body and desire into the text. Her theoretical work — alongside Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva — constitutes one of the central strands of French feminist thought. Her fiction and autobiography, spanning more than fifty books, include Dedans (prix Médicis, 1969), Portrait de Dora (1976), and L'Amour même dans la boîte aux lettres (2005). Her long collaboration with the director Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil produced major historical plays including L'Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, Roi du Cambodge (1985) and L'Indiade (1987). She has received honorary doctorates from universities across the world and her work has been translated into many languages.