”Feminine Writing” - The Evolution Of A Concept

The concept of “feminine writing” has caused much controversy in time. It appeared in France after the feminist movements in 1970, as a reaction to the lack of visibility of women writers, and it had three important stages. The first, temporally placed right after the events, whose spokeswoman was Hélène Cixous and was marked by her disputatious spirit. In the second stage, between the 80s and the 90s, a less troubled period, as the revolutionary enthusiasm decreased, the works of reference are those signed by Béatrice Didier and Christine Planté. A third stage is the one we are in at the moment – the stage from the beginning of the millennium – characterized by the fact that gender studies are more and more frequent and the efforts to reinstate a literature that has been ignored for a long time, as well as the concern to bring to the fore the literary femininity multiply. If in the period before the postmodernist era feminine literature had certain peculiarities due also to the social situation of women in a masculine society, nowadays the process of un-differentiation – a reflex of an equality that women gained with so much difficulty – is also manifested in the writing field.