Kebebasan Berekspresi Perempuan Indonesia dalam Perspektif Écriture Féminine Hélène Cixous: Women’s Freedom of Expression in Indonesia from the Perspective of Hélène Cixous’s Écriture Féminine

Julio Lorenzo Kapele (Sekolah Tinggi Filsafat Seminari Pineleng)

Melintas An International Journal of Philosophy and Religion
Vol. 41 No. 3 (2025): Melintas - An International Journal of Philosophy and Religion

Women’s freedom of expression in Indonesia is often understood through legal and human rights perspectives, while the dimensions of the body, language, and subjectivity that shape such freedom have received insufficient attention. This gap highlights the need for an approach that places women’s experiences at the center of understanding freedom of expression. This study aims to reconstruct women’s freedom of expression in Indonesia through Hélène Cixous’s concept of écriture féminine, using the body, language, and subjectivity as its analytical framework. This study employs a qualitative-philosophical design based on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic approach and a critical reading of écriture féminine. The analysis brings a textual reading of The Laugh of the Medusa into dialogue with documented secondary empirical data on women’s freedom of expression and gender-based violence in Indonesia through the principle of fusion of horizons. The findings demonstrate that women’s freedom of expression concerns not only the absence of external interference or the formation of subjects through power relations but also a productive process that unfolds through the circular relationship among the body, language, and subjectivity. The body serves as a source of experience and meaning production, language functions as a site for both the articulation and contestation of meaning, and subjectivity is formed and strengthened through women’s acts of self-articulation. This relationship can generate a productive cycle that enables women to reclaim their bodies and experiences as sources of expression. This study concludes that women’s freedom of expression should be reconstructed from something understood as given into an achievement. Freedom requires not only external protection but also a process through which women constitute and articulate themselves as subjects through various expressive practices, including those in digital spaces. These findings extend écriture féminine beyond its predominant use in literary studies by developing it as a philosophical framework for understanding women’s freedom of expression in Indonesia. This study proposes a body–language–subjectivity conceptual model that explains freedom of expression as a process of meaning production, subjectivity formation, and self-articulation.