What is the Nature of Women's Oppression in Language?

Abstract

Today I want to examine the question of women's oppression in and through language. I want to argue that there are two sides to this: on one hand, the sort of critique of language familiar to us from the work of many feminists; and on the other, the use of linguistic methods of analysis to uncover and talk about oppression more generally. The original question put to this panel was: 'is gender implicated in the struggle for the sign?'. Let me therefore begin by saying that in my view, that question is somewhat misleadingly framed. If there is indeed a struggle for the sign — or, as I prefer to put it, a struggle for meaning — it is not propelled by its own linguistic momentum, but by wider social and political forces. Hence my insistence on a two-sided project, directed to oppression and not just to language. It is idle, I believe, to address questions of sexual difference in isolation from the issue of dominance, and my argument is constructed with that point in mind. The struggle for meaning which concerns me here, then, is a more or less conscious part of the political struggle against women's oppression. And in this feminist struggle gender is not merely implicated, it actually is the disputed territory. As part of our project, feminists must challenge the dominant meanings that surround key concepts like masculinity and femininity: and we must make alternative interpretations available, if radical transformation is ever to happen. It is in the nature of any radical