Hélène Cixous, a French feminist, author, literary theorist, and post-structuralist, published “The Laugh of the Medusa” in 1975. Steeped in the bleak knowledge of lived experience and often overcome with passion and yearning, the article advocates for what Cixious termed écriture fémininee or, in English, “women’s writing.” As she explains, this mode of writing must be done by women, for women. This mode also demands new tactics and novel forms. Cixous imagines a literary environment that no longer inhibits authentic female authorship, which offers women writers the opportunity to express themselves beyond the scope of the masculine gaze of traditional authorship and writing style. Gender difference aside, Cixous notes that structuralism is equally complicit in suppressing women's literary lives. Indeed, “The Laugh of the Medusa” argues not only for female authorship but for unique, non-traditional authorship, promoting stream of consciousness and other unconventional styles and tones to best communicate women’s experiences as “others” who inevitably exist outside of the literary canon.

The need for écriture féminine stems from the inextricable links that bind women’s bodies to their creative production and, in particular, their writing. Men intentionally repressed female physicality and creativity for centuries, so the act of freeing one must invariably loosen the bonds of the other. For Cixous, women’s entrance en masse into the literary world would be a catalyst for women to reclaim their voices and their bodies. Men, she explains, have dominated religion, science, logic, reason, and writing, directly or indirectly, for hundreds of years. It is an insidious dominance that pretends at passivity to disguise the reality that the world as it is exists to serve men at the cost of women’s lives. Cixous focuses on the literary world, arguing that “publishing houses” rely on “an economy that works against us and off our backs,” but she is quick to note that the foundational ethos of the “history of reason” and the “religion of the father” are irrevocably mired in “phallocentric tradition.”

Cixous invites readers to ponder the causes and effects of female suppression. She argues that the masculine prerogative of dominance stems from fear; that is, men have intentionally designed a world in which women are repressed and reduced because they are, in fact, afraid of women’s influence and power. The article extends this line of investigation further, explaining that men have purposefully turned women against each other, taught them to hate themselves, and conditioned them to despise other women. In so doing, the hierarchy of power remains unchanged, and men reign dominant, patterns she sees as equally relevant to the spheres of literature and authorship. Women’s writing, then, is not only a means of breaking into a predominantly male environment. Indeed, it is a means of deprogramming, breaking a cycle that has become all too defining, and disavowing internalized self-hatred. 

Cixous claims that women must write because "there has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity." As she makes this demand, Cixious acknowledges the difficulty of her lofty goal, as the act of writing bears the burden of ingrained misogyny and internalized doubt:

Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient,...