French feminist theorist and poet Hélène Cixous published her landmark essay 'Le Rire de la Méduse' (The Laugh of the Medusa) in the Paris journal L'Arc in 1975, calling on women to write their bodies — to break out of the patriarchal language that had corseted feminine expression as surely as the garment had corseted the female torso. Cixous argued that women's writing had been suppressed and distorted by a masculine symbolic order, and that genuine feminine creativity required the invention of a new bodily language. The essay became one of the most influential texts in late twentieth-century feminist theory.

Cixous's concept of écriture féminine — writing grounded in the specificity of the female body — provided feminist poets with a theoretical justification and a creative programme for exactly the kind of bodily poetry they were already producing. Her essay is in direct dialogue with the feminist poetry of Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, and her metaphors of bodily writing against patriarchal constraint invoke the same history of female confinement symbolised by the corset. Her influence extended across French, Anglophone, and postcolonial feminist poetics.