Özet:

In the 1970s Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, the leading names of the Second Wave French Feminism, deconstructed the phallus-centered western thought with the methods of language analysis, feminine language and feminine writing. These philosophers developed the practice of female writing and female criticism to criticize the negligence of female voices in philosophical and literary texts. In this study, the Penelope myth, rewritten by Margaret Atwood from Odysseia, will be read by using the ideas of Jacques Derrida. Derrida opposes the phallus and language dominance by the concepts of différance and deconstruction. With these strategies, he tried to shake the ideas of "logocentrism" and "phallocentrism" that are the sources of binary oppositions, pushing the former over the latter to create its own "other". In this respect, Derrida, aiming to create a new language that will not allow the exclusion of the "other", raised also feminist theory and methodology with his ideas about the woman's position as a subject. Post-structuralist feminists place the emphasis on a similar problem with Derrida. Hélène Cixous developed a feminine writing practice that would deconstruct western philosophy surrounded by masculine language. This writing practice aims to question how male and female opposition are produced by language and how woman becomes a negative or complementary term. Cixous desires that women should struggle to write themselves so that they can go out of the hegomonic world of men. In order to go beyond male discourse, a woman must write her own body and sexuality. The aim of the study is to analyze The Penelopiad novel by deconstructing dichotomies such as male/female, self/other, gender issues and feminine writing. It will be answered how Atwood used perfectly the deconstruction of myth in feminine writing that emerged from Derrida's thoughts and changed and transformed with feminist thinkers.

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