A woman’s language?

Abstract

For the theorists and writers whose work is included in this book, the dominant ideology in the West is both male-determined and repressive, subordinating whatever is defined as different — other — in ways which appropriate and suppress its other status. Woman is defined in relation to man according to this schema, our difference functioning to confirm men’s position as master. In this second chapter on women and language, I turn more specifically to women’s role in language to examine, in the light of post-structural and psychoanalytic accounts of the creation of difference in language, what a ‘woman’s language’ might mean.

What can be said about a feminine sexuality ‘other’ than the one prescribed in, and by, phallocratism? How can its language be recovered, or invented? How, for women, can the question of their sexual exploitation be articulated with the question of their social exploitation? …. How can they free themselves from their expropriation within patriarchal culture?

Luce Irigaray

From the moment that she begins to speak, to exist, she has to face problems which are all masculine and this is what puts her in mortal danger — if she doesn’t use them, she doesn’t exist, if she does use them, she kills herself with them.

Antoinette Fouque

So, urgently and anxiously, I look for a scene in which a type of exchange would be produced that would be different, a kind of desire that wouldn’t be in collusion with the old story of death.

Hélène Cixous