French Feminism MCQs: Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, bell hooks

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Literary Theory · Part 15 of 25 · 1970s–1980s

Feminism II: French Feminism & Black Feminism

Écriture FéminineSemiotic ChoraParler FemmeWomanism

What is French Feminism? French feminism drew on psychoanalysis and deconstruction to theorise a feminine language: Hélène Cixous called for écriture féminine in “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), Luce Irigaray wrote of parler femme, and Julia Kristeva described the semiotic chora. Black and Third-World feminists such as bell hooks and Alice Walker brought race and class to the centre.

This part covers Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Black and Third-World feminism. The questions are drawn from previous UGC NET, SET, PhD entrance and Assistant Professor papers, and every answer comes with a short explanation. Tap an option to check your answer.

Hélène Cixous Julia Kristeva (Feminist)Black & Third-World Feminism

Hélène Cixous

1. Who among the following feminist theorists posited a separate realm of female experience captured in a style of writing different from men’s?

A. Elaine Showalter

B. Luce Irigaray

C. Kate Millett

D. Simone de Beauvoir

E. Hélène Cixous

Choose the correct answer from the options given below:

A, C and D only
B and D only
C, D and E only
B and E only

Cixous’s écriture féminine and Irigaray’s parler femme both posit a distinctively feminine language rooted in female bodily experience, unlike Showalter, Millett or Beauvoir.

2. This was a path-breaking feminist essay written in the 1970s which used hybrid terms like “sext” and “chaosmos.” Identify the author.

Luce Irigaray
Hélène Cixous
Julia Kristeva
Simone de Beauvoir

Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) coins words such as ‘sext’ and ‘chaosmos’ while calling women to write the body.

Julia Kristeva (Feminist)

3. In Julia Kristeva’s essay “The System and the Speaking Subject”, the ________ aspect is associated with authority, order, fathers, repression and control.

Imaginary
Semiotic
Symbolic
Natural

Kristeva opposes the paternal symbolic, linked with law, order and repression, to the maternal semiotic, the pre-linguistic flow of drives and rhythms.

4. According to Plato, “a state of language anterior to the Word” is called ________.

Chora
Organic form
Surrealism
Semiotic

Kristeva borrowed the term chora, a receptacle, from Plato’s Timaeus to name the pre-verbal, maternal space of drives that precedes the symbolic order.

5. For her notion of the basic opposition between the semiotic and the symbolic, Kristeva was indebted to Jacques Lacan and his distinction between two realms, the ________ and the ________.

Reference / referent
Imaginary / symbolic
Syntagm / syntagmatic
Story / discourse

Kristeva’s semiotic and symbolic rework Lacan’s pre-Oedipal imaginary, centred on the mirror stage and mother, and the paternal symbolic order of language.

6. According to Julia Kristeva, it is the eruption of the ______ within the ______ that provides the creative and innovative impulse of modern poetic language.

individual, tradition
specific, generic
particular, general
semiotic, symbolic

In Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) Kristeva argues that the pre-Oedipal semiotic, linked to the chora, erupts into and disrupts the symbolic order.

7. In which of her books does Julia Kristeva introduce the idea of the ‘abject’?

Revolution in Poetic Language
Desire in Language
Powers of Horror
The Abject and the Horrible

Kristeva theorises abjection, the expulsion of what threatens the boundaries of the self, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980).

Black & Third-World Feminism

8. The term “womanism” was first used by

Hélène Cixous
Gayatri Spivak
Kate Millett
Alice Walker

Alice Walker coined ‘womanist’ and defined it in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) for Black women’s feminism.

9. Who coined the term “intersectionality”?

bell hooks
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Toni Morrison
Elaine Showalter

Kimberlé Crenshaw coined intersectionality in 1989 to describe how race, gender and other categories of oppression overlap.

10. The word “womanist” was used by

Alice Walker
Zora Neale Hurston
Toni Morrison
Harriet Beecher Stowe

Alice Walker defined “womanist” for Black feminism in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983).

11. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s ‘Under Western Eyes’ is a critique of the notion of:

Marginalised women
Subaltern women
Third world women
Women as victims

Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” (1984) criticises Western feminist discourse for constructing a monolithic, homogeneous “Third World Woman” as its other.

12. “Ain’t I a Woman?” is now a central text of:

Radical feminism
Black feminism
Third world feminism
Lesbian theory

Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech, echoed in bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman (1981), is foundational to Black feminism’s analysis of intersecting race and gender oppression.

13. Read the Assertion (A) and Reason (R) and choose the correct option.

Assertion (A): The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act.

Reason (R): Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens, in that violent, self-serving act of erasure, to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The literature itself suggests otherwise.

A makes complete sense in the light of R
A makes complete sense regardless of R
Neither A nor R makes complete sense
R challenges the view advanced in A

Both lines come from Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992); the acid image illustrates her claim that enforced racelessness is itself a racial act that marks the one who erases.

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1000+ Literary Theory MCQs – Part 15: Feminism II: French Feminism & Black Feminism

Hélène Cixous

Julia Kristeva (Feminist)

Black & Third-World Feminism

1000+ Literary Theory MCQs – Part 21: Postmodernism: Lyotard & Baudrillard

1000+ Literary Theory MCQs – Part 17: Postcolonial Theory: Said, Spivak, Bhabha & Fanon

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