Hélène Cixous

In 1955, the Hélène got married to Guy Berger, who was a teacher of philosophy.

The couple had a daughter, Anne-Emmanuelle, in 1957, and a son, Stéphane, three years later. Stéphane died as an infant and the next year, another son, Pierre-François, was born.

The writer and her husband got divorced in 1964, after nine years of marriage.

Hélène Cixous was born on June 5, 1937, to French physician Georges Cixous and his Austro-German wife Eve, in Oran, a city in the French colony of Algeria.

When Hélène was just eleven years old, Georges died of tuberculosis, which was ironically his topic of research. To fend for the family, which consisted of the little girl and her brother Pierre, Eve started working as a midwife in Algeria.

In 1955, she joined the ‘Lycée Lakanal’, a school in Paris, to prepare for her university entrance examinations. The next year, the young woman started preparing for her ‘agrégation’, which is a teacher’s eligibility examination in France.

Cixous began teaching at a school in the French town of Arcachon, in 1959. The following year, she met Jean-Jacques Mayoux who helped the writer with her thesis on English writer James Joyce.

Two years later, in 1962, this talented author started working at the ‘University of Bordeaux’ as an assistant teacher. The same year, she made acquaintance with Jacques Derrida, a philosopher who too helped her learn more about writer Joyce.

Cixous travelled to the US in 1963, where she studied Joyce’s manuscripts, working along with psychoanalytical theoretician, Jacques Lacan. After two years of research on Joyce, she returned to France and was appointed as an assistant teacher at the ‘University of Sorbonne’.

In 1967, ‘Le Prénom du Dieu’ (‘God’s First Name’), Hélène’s first fictional work, was published. After the book’s success, this exceptional writer was appointed as a professor, without a PhD, at the ‘University of Nanterre’.

Edgar Faure, the Minister of Education in France, gave her the responsibility of starting ‘Paris VIII’, in 1968. This experimental university teaches unusual subjects like urban planning, psychoanalysis, geopolitics, and gender studies.

Of all her feminism-centric works of fiction, theatre and essays, Hélène Cixous is most known for her book ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, written in 1975. The book was translated from French to English the next year, by writers Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen for ‘Signs’, an American journal that focuses on feminism. The book employs the rhetoric of allusions to talk about feminism and the acceptance of bisexuality.