Introduction: Language and Feminism

Abstract

The question of language and it’s political implications has exercised writers, philosophers and social theorists throughout the intellectual history of western civilisation. It is noticeable, too, that the subject has inspired extreme pessimism: from ancient Greece to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, speech and writing have been credited with a malign power to regulate human social relations in ways we are not aware of and to disguise important truths in a cloud of misleading rhetoric. Today’s speakers inherit the idea that language is a weapon, used by the powerful to oppress, and silence their subordinates; nor is this belief unjustified. But why should language, and knowledge about language, be a resource for the powerful alone? Why shouldn’t this ‘weapon’ be appropriated by the other side?