Hélène Cixous is a prolific writer who is acknowledged around the world for her contribution to feminist literary theory and the many other areas her numerous works cover. When Hélène Cixous wrote The Laugh of the Medusa in 1975, she spoke of many issues pertaining to woman and feminine writing, including the maternal, the male dominated world of writing and calls for a new way of writing. The body and feminine sexuality are important to remember when reading Cixous’s text as they are both reoccurring messages and images that Cixous believes are important to writing as a woman, often linking to and challenging Freud’s theories. These aspects are carried through the text and appear in various capacities and with varying success and clarity. Cixous discusses many different things within her text though there are a few that appear more frequently than others. Speaking about women’s writing and stating on more than one occasion how important it is that women write; for other women and themselves, Cixous compels women to write though she states that “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing”1. Woman writing for woman and man for man is something that Cixous expresses on more than one occasion and it is interesting whether this statement would still be considered strategic today. Whilst there is no longer such a dramatic difference in the worlds of female and male writing as there once was and many notable writers have the ability to cross this divide, a large number still fall into this particular rule. However, Abigail Bray (2004, p.8) writes that Cixous “would not argue that phallocentric thinking or writing is limited to men or that feminine thinking or writing is limited to women”. It is noted repeatedly throughout the piece that writing has become dominated by the masculine and that women have been “driven away [from writing] as violently as from their bodies” (2010, p.1942), drawing the connection between the oppression of woman, their sexuality and their exclusion within the literary world. Cixous argues that women need to dare to enter this male dominated area and write what is undeniably ‘woman’. Bray (2004, p.6), describes Cixous as a woman of simple wisdom, stating that “she argues that it is fear which endows power with the ability to oppress” believing that it is the fear of lacking imposed on woman that is their greatest lacking, in turn enabling men to dominate the field of writing and that “Men have committed the greatest crime against women.” (Leitch 2010, p 1944). “Woman must write her self” states