Women and language

Abstract

Post-structural accounts of the role of language in the formation of social and individual reality have had a major impact on French intellectual debates in recent decades. In this first of two chapters exploring the French feminist view of language, I shall outline how French feminists have theorised the role of language in women’s oppression and show how language is also a central preoccupation of a range of contemporary French women’s fiction. One critic who has had an important influence on debates on language is the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and, in keeping with my intention to present French feminism in context, I shall begin this first chapter on women and language with a brief introduction to his work.

The women say it is necessary to disregard the discourses one has made them uphold against their thoughts and which have obeyed the codes and conventions of the cultures that have domesticated them… The women say there is no reality before words rules statutes have given it form… The women say that in the first place the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, utterly shaken up, that each word must be screened.

Monique Wittig

Now, I-woman am going to blow up the Law … let it happen, right now, in language.

Hélène Cixous