the subject and humanizes her and him, according to Ettinger, via the feminine sexuality, pre-maternal experiences and maternal potentiality. Ettinger's language, developed slowly from 1985 and until now in poetic writing in artist's books and in academic writing, includes her original concepts like: matrixial time-space, matrixial space, metramorphosis, com-passion, coemergence, cofading, copoiesis, wit(h)nessing, fascinance, carriance, psychic pregnance, distance-in-proximity, borderlnking, borderspacing, proximity-in-distance, matrixial feminine/prenatal Encounter-event and ethical seduction-into-life. Many writers in the fields of Film theory, psychoanalysis, ethics, aesthetics, Literature studies, Contemporary art and Art History are using the Ettingerian matrixial sphere (matricial sphere) in their analysis of contemporary and historical material. Critiques The approach through language to feminist action has been criticised by some as over-theoretical: they would see the fact that the very first meeting of a handful of would-be feminist activists in 1970 only managed to launch an acrimonious theoretical debate as marking the situation as typically 'French' in its apparent insistence on the primacy of theory over politics. Nonetheless, in practice the French women's movement developed in much the same way as the feminist movements elsewhere in Europe or in the United States: French women participated in consciousness-raising groups; demonstrated in the streets on the 8 March; fought hard for women's right to choose whether to have children; raised the issue of violence against women; and struggled to change public opinion on issues concerning women and women's rights. Further criticisms of écriture féminine include what some claim is an essentialist view of the body and the consequential reliance on a feminism of 'difference' which, according to Diana Holmes, for instance, tends to "demonize masculinity as the repository of all that (at least from a post-'68, broadly Left perspective) is negative. It also, says Holmes in French Women's Writings, 1848-1994 (1996), would exclude much of women's writing from the feminist canon. Literary examples As a result of the difficulties inherent in the notion of "écriture féminine", very few books of literary criticism have run the risk of using it as a critical tool. A. S. Byatt offers: "There is a marine and salty female wave-water to be...read as a symbol of female language, which is partly suppressed, partly self-communing, dumb before the intruding male and not able to speak out...thus mirroring those female secretions which are not inscribed in our daily use of language (langue, tongue)". See also Assia Djebar Gynocriticism Postmodern feminism Notes External links "The Laugh