Whose body writes? Duras, Nh. Dini, and the limits of écriture féminine
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Hélène Cixous's écriture féminine promises that women who write from the body write their way out of phallogocentric language, yet the concept has rarely been tested against writing by women whose bodies were also marked by colonial difference. This study compares Marguerite Duras's L'Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991) and Nh. Dini's Pada Sebuah Kapal (1972), two novels of female desire written from opposite sides of the colonial encounter between France and Asia. Using a qualitative comparative method, passages concerning the body, desire, language, race, and money were read closely against three markers of écriture féminine and interpreted through postcolonial feminist theory. The results reveal a paradox. Duras realizes the markers almost fully, but each realization rests on colonial privileges of race, language, and money. Dini departs from all three: her narration is chronological, measured, and deliberate, and the second half of the novel, narrated by a French officer, exposes the colonial gaze that reads the heroine's body before she speaks. We argue that these departures are strategies rather than failures and propose the concept of mediated embodiment to describe them. Écriture féminine can travel, but only as a situated rather than a universal poetics.
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