Feminist Models of Language (II): Semiology, Postmodernism and the Debate on the ‘Gendered Subject’

Abstract

For more than a decade now there has been a sustained and serious challenge to the kind of feminism and the kind of linguistic theory that Dale Spender and the Ardeners represent. The challenge comes from the intellectual movements I have referred to as ‘semiology’ and ‘postmodernism’. While these two movements are not the same, and there are important internal differences within each as well as between the two, they overlap historically, thematically and politically in significant ways. That is why I will treat them together here, opposing them (as indeed they self-consciously oppose themselves) to the models we considered in the last chapter.