Écriture matière: a text that matters

Karina Quinn

The first of La Trobe's 2015 philosophy seminar series. Join us for food, drink and good conversation:

Écriture matière: a text that matters

In the mid 1970s Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigiray (among others) famously placed a call for women to write their bodies as a way to break the bonds of patriarchal language structures and create a space for women’s writing by using the form now most commonly known as écriture féminine. For the last three years I have written a book called all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body, and what I have discovered is that écriture féminine is not enough. How can écriture féminine describe this particular body, that is genderqueer, and tattooed, and has lost its womb? What if, instead of écriture féminine, there was écriture matière? What if every body, when allowed to write, to tell stories, to speak, was able to enact a form of narrative and civil disobedience, an unerasing of the corporeal from text? This paper is the development of the concept of écriture matière, a call for all bodies to write themselves, as they find themselves, in this moment, now. It is a call to create a generative textual and material space that is anything but exclusionary: a text that matters.