Women's rights and women's writing

This essay argues that Virginia Woolf's alternative aesthetics anticipate Clarice Lispector's experimental writing and culminate in Helene Cixous's anti-foundational thinking about writing. Woolf in The Waves and Lispector in Agua viva (The Stream of Life) introduce compelling questions about the desire, need, and right to write, and the living waters of the writing performance. Freedom is freedom from male discourse and domination, masculine cultural ideas, and the "subject." Woof and Lispector dismantle totalizing modes of thinking in order to transfigure themselves and others in "the act of writing." Writing against phallologocentrism, challenging oppression and injustice, reconstituting subject-other relationships in The Waves and Agua viva, Woolf and Lispector perform Cixous's ecriture feminine (women's writing), free themselves from traditional gender constitutions, and focus on writing as sensory response, exploring possibilities of language, disorganizing to organize, transfiguring reality with new signs, generating new modes of thinking and being while writing the "other." Anticipating Derrida's deconstruction and exploring the sense of touch, Woolf and Lispector are able to break the silence and write genesis according to a woman.