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Helen Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler all share a common interest in the subject as it has been viewed in literature, discourse, psycho-philosophical realms and even in the normative socio-economical context. The authors are alike, in that they strive to achieve a new epoch for woman to exist, and eliminate the notion a ‘dominant male patriarchal society’. The remedy is to stray away from the connotation of having any previous normative attributes expressed in discourses, literature, psychologies, philosophies, which have all historically been written by a ‘man’.
Luce Irigaray’s Revolutions of the World states that “For the work of sexual difference to take place, a revolution in thought and ethics is needed. We must re-interpret the whole relationship between the subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic, and the macrocosmic” (Irigaray, 170). Her reason for such a revolution has something to do with who writes about the subject. She argues that “…subject has always been written in the masculine form, as man…” (170). Her polarized examples include the sex in which is given to man by g-d, in which is presented as something paternal and masculine. One can even stress the bible, insofar as to argue that god has created men in the image of himself. She argues that woman have been viewed as minor art forms, such that include cooking, knitting, sewing, and embroidery. From the economical stance, there appears to be a class struggle between man and woman. The solution for the problem is to create a new age for woman. A new perception and conception, a revolution to change the economy of desire, create a different relationship between men and god(s), man and man, man and world, man and woman. She wants to stray away from the conception of woman as in work of art, which is romantic, but is misinterpreted. The truth for Irigaray is that in reality, there is space between woman and man. The space is stuffed with attraction, greed, possession, disgust, and consumption.
From a psycho-philosophical stance, Helen Cixous Sorties, shares a very common interest to that of Irigaray. Cixous “calls for a radical rethinking of the subject not simply in relation to discourse, society and culture, but to the very cosmos [(space and time)] itself”. Cixous is about the possibility of appropriating Freudian or Post-Freudian psychoanalytical ideas for a theory of feminine subjectivity. Cixous argues that “Freudianism represents another example of patriarchal voyeurism”. In that “everything is reduced to the issue of having the phallus, then everything is reduced to the issue of having or not having the phallus, then woman is also and inevitably either reduced to passivity or non-existence” (226).
She also focuses on the notion of ‘man’ being at the origin of written philosophies. She states that “The philosophical constructs itself starting with the abasement of woman. Subordination of the feminine to the masculine order which appears to be the condition for the functioning of the machine” (231). It is this view that she wishes to change. This patriarchal philosophical stance has creating the affiliation of a ‘man’ as logocentrist, who caries ration power. And philosophy which plays a foundation for psychology replaces notion of rationale as power with phallocentrism, in that the one with a phallus claims sexual power. And it is phallocentrism which becomes the ‘Enemy’ for Cixous, and the subject.
Butler on the other hand focuses, or introduces the concept of a ‘drag’ as in relation to performance. Judith Butler, the feminist philosopher introduces a new term she refers to as ‘performativity’. She claims that it is the sexual performativity, or performance of an individual (e.g. drag) that manifest itself into a normative performance of gender, which reveals the hyperbolic norm itself. “Drag revels that heterosexuality itself can only be a performance, for its logic requires exclusive categories of femininity and masculinity”(229). One can conclude that a ‘drag’ can misrepresent a role of a woman as the ‘drag’ only performs. Ultimately, “the hyperbolic conformity to the command can reveal the hyperbolic status of the norm itself, indeed can become the cultural sign by which that cultural imperative might become legible.” In other words it is such literature, and discourses that allow the woman to adapt to the normative ideal of what a woman ought to perform like. Can a ‘drag’ really influence how a women ought to behave? According to Butler, it is this performance of the drag, who is performed by a male, which “opens up a difficult future terrain community, one in which the hope of every fully recognizing oneself in the terms by which one signifies is sure to be [disappointing].”