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Okay, my response to this topic got rather long, so I stuck it in a blog rather than posting it here in its entirety. You can find it if you go to this link: /exchange/node/1158. Here's the beginning, just to give you an idea of where I'm going with it...

When I came to class on Tuesday after reading Spivak's essay, I was feeling terribly daunted. I hadn't read any of the books she used to illustrate her ideas (though I was pretty familiar with the plot of Frankenstein), and found it very difficult to get through her writing and extract anything useful, if only because I didn't know what she was trying to say most of the time. Our discussion & small group work in class were helpful, but I still didn't take very strongly to Spivak's ideas. I suppose, as I've said before on this forum and in class, feminism is something that I feel involves a connection on a personal level as well as on an academic/activist level... and I felt virtually no connection with her essay at all.

But this afternoon, I sat down to read Cixous's essay and had a completely different reaction. Something about her writing style drew me in immediately (perhaps, like Abby, I'm a sucker for a good sex metaphor?), and though her ideas are indeed complex and a little intangible, and her style is extremely "free," as others have described it, I found that I could relate to what she said more than the work of any other writer we've encountered so far. In a sense, I feel like this is the reading I've been waiting for over the past few weeks... the first thing that's really spoken to me on a deeper level...