Écriture féminine, or "women's writing", is a term coined by French feminist and literary theorist Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa". Cixous aimed to establish a genre of literary writing that deviates from traditional masculine styles of writing, one which examines the relationship between the cultural and psychological inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text. This strand of feminist literary theory originated in France in the early 1970s through the works of Cixous and other theorists including Luce Irigaray, Chantal Chawaf, Catherine Clément, and Julia Kristeva and has subsequently been expanded upon by writers such as psychoanalytic theorist Bracha Ettinger. who emerged in this field in the early 1990s,

Écriture féminine as a theory foregrounds the importance of language for the psychic understanding of self. Cixous is searching for what Isidore Isou refers to as the "hidden signifer" in language which expresses the ineffable and what cannot be expressed in structuralist language. It has been suggested by Cixous herself that more free and flowing styles of writing such as stream of consciousness, have a more "feminine" structure and tone than that of more traditional modes of writing. This theory draws on ground theory work in psychoanalysis about the way that humans come to understand their social roles. In doing so, it goes on to expound how women, who may be positioned as 'other' in a masculine symbolic order, can reaffirm their understanding of the world through engaging with their own otherness, both within and outside their own minds, or consciousness.