User:Queenfeline/Words We Inherit, Words We Invent

Reclaiming language as a feminist practice

IDEA

Why is language a feminist issue?

–> through and with language women are held oppressed and language is tied to the social and sexual hierarchy. The male as a default and the semantic derogation of women. Its not only what women speak but also how that is critizied (vocal fry)

How are feminist values encoded—or silenced—through language and publishing formats?

How do feminist movements use language to resist, redefine, or reclaim power?

To have words for experiences shapes how we see/interpret those experiences.

feminist glossary

How are definitions and glossaries sites of epistemic control — and how can they be reclaimed for feminist ends? Who defines meaning, and who gets to speak? How does gendered language reflect power dynamics and reinforces cultural and societal norms?

How can a glossary be used as a feminist publishing method?

How are certain voices marginalized or excluded from meaning-making? Can glossaries be performative, open-ended, or generative rather than fixed? What happens if definitions are open to multiple interpretations, narratives, or contradictions?

– Make my own feminist glossary – with the possibility for people to contribute to it in order to hear voices that mostly stay unheard.

Why make it online and with that global? Different people all around the world make different experiences and in order to practice intersectionality it is important to also hear voices which widen your understanding of what it means to behave feministic in this day and age.

A glossary is traditionally linear, authoritative, closed. But what if it was open-ended, networked, affective, or contradictory — like lived experience? Can definitions reflect lived experience, not just academic consensus? What happens to a glossary if we abandon objectivity and embrace subjectivity?

I could ask (famous) feminists/ researchers to write for the glossary.

Who is it for and how should they feel using it?

looks

– have a site for each letter and then a sub-site for each word.

– there is a submit button so people can contribute – how do I prevent spamming and not welcoming contributions? – Make a code of conduct/manifesto/rules for this project. – add positionality statement. (what terms or frameworks do I reject, and why?)

– Do I moderate it? i should.

– Make it look like a mindmap. everything is interlinked, you can jump from one definition to another. – annotate where definitions come from: lived experience, literature, oral history, protest signs, etc.

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RESEARCH

Links

The Power of words shaping gender equality through language

How language reflects gender differneces

Why Women’s Language Matters: Identity, Representation, and Power

The feminist critique of language – Deborah Cameron

s.1 – Why is language a feminist issue?

1.Silence and exclusion from language, which also raises the question of finding an authentic female voice

s.3 – Language is on one sense the inalienable birthright of every human being, regardless of gender; some forms of linguistic activity, moreover, are popularly associated with women as much as or possibly even more than with men (for example gossip, storytelling, letters and diaries)

They are private forms of language, confined to the space of the home or village community: in the public domain of culture these genres have no currency, let alone value.

The silence of women is above all a an absence of female voices and concern from high culture.

it is not just that women don't speak, often they are explicitly prevented from speaking, either by social taboos and restrictions or by the more genteel tyrannies of custom and practice. Even where it seems that women could speak if they chose, the condition imposed on their lives by society may make this a difficult or dangerous choice. Silence can also mean censoring yourself for fear of being ridiculed, attacked, or ignored.

Explicit language is still thought more inappropriate for women (and in their presence) than for men

In writing women are excluded from the knowlage and skill needed to write at all.

Writing is not an organic growth out of general linguistic capabilities, but a technology; like most technologies it has been monopolized by the powerful. Gender differences are striking enough

Taking away the skills to read and write also takes away power. The oppressed shall stay dump so they don't clock the injustices that are going on

6. In modern societies, the language of permanence and authority is always written language: if women are illiterate, they will not be able to share fully on the culture and specifically, they will not play a full part in shaping it. Illiteracy is not the only obstacle to it tho: most women, even those of the privileged classes, lack the economic independence and leisure time which are needed for sustained literary effort.

There is a general assumption that women's time and energy are endlessly available for ministering to the needs of others, and women themselves feel this constraint on their endeavours.

7. Yet if women writers must take pains to avoid being unfeminine, they also must avoid being too explicitly, uncomfortably feminine: many women have felt constrained to keep silent about specifically female experiences and concerns, since these habe been defined as outside the 'human values' literature deals with.

The pressure to avoid discussing female experience is not confined to the literary domain, it is felt throughout public discourse and to some extend in private discourse too. In the early years of the modern Women's Liberation Movement women organized consciousness raising groups and 'speakouts' where the aim was to discuss and bear witness to experiences like incest and backstreet abortion, as well as less obvious taboo subjects from our lives. This was perceived as a political act if breaking silence, painful but liberating. It challenged prevailing views of the world, and lessened the isolation of individual women.

so is there even an authentic women's language or feminine writing?

Is it enough to for women to speak and write as men do?

If we're 'allowed in' to literature and culture only on condition that we accept conventional (masculine) ways of expressing ourselves, we are simply exchanging one silence for another

10. The appropriate task for feminist criticism is to concentrate on women's access to language...on the ideological and cultural determinants of expression (i.e., the social rather than the psychic). The problem is not that language is insufficient to express women's consciousness but that women have been denied the full resources of language and have been forced into silence, euphemism and circumlocution.

11. The body, sexuality irrationality: a phenomenon in which women are identifies with sex, body, passion while men are identified with reason and the mind. De Beauvior explicitly rejected the idea that rationality and everything else our culture values were inherently masculine: she said they were human, universal, but dishonestly claimed by the patriarchs for themselves.

Language is irreducibly a social practice, grounded in history. Whatever changes in perception and expression we manage collectively to bring about, we will always carry with us the baggage of history in the domain of language as everywhere else.

2.naming and representation, in which the meaning of gender is constructed and contested

12. Next issue: Not women speaking but women spoken about.

Language encodes the culture's values and preoccupations, and transmits these furthermore, to each new generation.

It is thus the utmost importance for feminists to examine how issues of gender are represented in languages. Like other representations linguistic representations both give a clue to the place of women in the culture and constitute one means whereby we are kept in our place.

On the whole, our language is sexist: that is, they represent or 'name' the world from a masculine viewpoint and in accordance with stereotyped beliefs about the sexes.

In religion: a man in the person of Adam gave names to God's creation and this male monopoly of naming has serious consequences – many feminists have claimed, that the names we give our world are not mere reflections of reality, nor arbitrary labels with no relation to it.

Names are a culture's way of fixing what will actually count as reality in a universe of overwhelming, chaotic sensations, all pregnant with a multitude of possible meanings.

we use language to organize our experiences and that differs from culture to culture

Many languages have an underlaying semantic or grammatical rule whereby male is positive and female negative, so that the tenets of male chauvinism are encoded into language; and the reason why languages are structured in this sexist way is that their rules and meanings have been literally 'man made': women have been excluded from naming and definition.

14. Language itself cannot be sexist it is the way we use language that is sexist – Language could be seen as a reflection of sexist culture; or it could be seen as a carrier of ideas and assumptions which become, through their constant re-enactment in discourse, so familiar and conventional we miss their significance.

'sexist language' cannot be regarded as simply the naming of the world from one, masculine perspective; it is better conceptualized as a multifaceted phenomenon occurring in a number of quite complex systems of representation, all with their places in historical traditions

15. 'man' as the synonym to humanity – the generic masculine, the norm, with women as exceptions. (which is also female silencing in a way)

men = active, women = passive; in literature men wipe out women's creativity and reduce them to passive objects in relation not just to art but also sex and reproduction – their language reflects and reinforces sexist definitions of gender. (men 'penetrate' and 'screw' while women 'get laid')

The most obvious place where the idea of a women as a passive sexual object is found is the lexicon (vocabulary) OMGGG THATS EXACTLY WHY I NEED TO MAKE A FEMINIST GLOSSARY!!! (also the cambridge dictionary still mentions 'feisty lady' first in the list of examples and i bet there are many more [] here another good one...a slut is obviously also a women...)

16. There are also no masculine equivalent to any female curse words

Linguistic conventions mark women not just as sex objects but as male property. 'I had her' meaning 'we had intercourse', marriage is symbolic of the passage from father's property to husband's, the title of Miss or Mrs further indicate whether a women is still 'on the market' or not.

One reason why feminists have paid detailed attention to language and discourse: our ways of talking about things reveal attitudes and assumptions we might well consciously disown (no longer embedded in law), thus testifying to the deep-rootedness of sexism

17. When rape gets reported it is being represented as a crime against a man rather than a women. 'rape' was synonymous to 'theft', in some cultures still, to rape a women was to rob her father or husband of her value by rendering her unchaste...

19. To detach language from its historical, cultural, and social roots, to think of it as outside individual and societal control, is a certain route to political quietism – a sense that nothing can be changed.

A Feminist Dictionary by Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler draws attention to the authoritarian and sexist nature of mainstream lexicography

3. behavioural differences in language, their relation to male dominance and female culture

Feminism in Philosophy of Language – Jennifer Hornsby

s.2 – One question raised was whether concerted attempts to avoid sexism in speech might themselves constitute a feminist advance, or whether language’s working to women’s detriment is merely a symptom of existing power relations. On the assumption that language can be a site of oppression in its own right, some argued that women’s enfranchisement—whether as political subjects or as knowledgeable beings—required women to find a distinctive voice.

s.3 – the use of language is treated always in a social context, in which the presence of gendered beings is taken for granted.

s.3 – What is it for words and sentences to be meaningful?

s.3 – speech is action.

s.3 – three broad categories of things people do with words: 1. locutionary (speaking), 2. illocutionary (things done in speaking) and 3. perlocutionary (things done by speaking) acts

s.4 – Semantic theories are supposed to reveal words and sentences as the meaningful things they are; but we gain a conception of words and sentences as meaningful through an idea of speakers’ using them.

s.4 – saying something to someone will count as fundamental among the various things that speakers do in making meaningful noises.

s.5 – In accepting that saying to another is a communicative speech act, one allows that the idea of people saying things coexists with the idea of people understanding others as saying things to them.

On design, feminism, and friendship – Briar Levit

s.16 – Nowadays, girls have the vocabulary to express how they feel and how they want to be treated in explicitly feminist terms, with those discussions starting much earlier.

Wordslut – Amanda Montell

s.4 – Over the Decades linguists have learned that pretty much every corner of language is touched by gender, from the most miscroscopic units of sound to the broadest categories of conversation.

s.9 – Language has always been, and continues to be, used to reflect and reinforce power structures and social norms.

s.10 – Its the way English is habitually used that "expresses (and so reproduces) some culturally ingrained sexist assumptions." This means –good news– the English language is not innately biased against women and nonbinary genders; but the bad news is that its speakers have collectively consented to wield it in a way that reinforces existing gender biases, often in ways they're not even aware of.

s.26 – Linguists have actually determined that the majority of insults for men sprout from refereneces to femininity, either from allusions to women themselves or stereotypically feminine men.

s.31 – When English speakers want to insult a women, they compare her to one of a few things; a food (tart), an animal (bitch), or a sex worker (slut). That we have used language to systematically reduce women to edible, nonhuman, and sexual entities for so many years is no coincidence. Instead, it makes a clear statement about the expectations, hopes and fears of our society as a whole.

s.39 – reclamation. people actively redefining what these words mean from the ground up.

s.40 – There are also words like bitch, ho, dyke and cunt which are definitely still used abusively, but have also evolved as terms of endearment among women who use them inside their own groups (which is usually how a word’s reclamation begins — it’s when the rule of “I can cal myself this word, but you can’t” becomes more relaxed over time).

s.41 – Perhaps when we call each other ho, we acknowledge that we are women who have sex and earn our own money too, and when we call each other bitch, we acknowledge the realities of this man-made world and affirm our abuts survive in it. Through resistance comes redefinition.

s.42 – Semantic change down not happen overnight; instead, it’s a more gradual process wherein one meaning slowly overlaps another, then eclipses it.

s.44 – the first step we can take to reduce the harm caused by gendered insults is simply to avoid using them abusively.

s.68 – But there is still an intense drive to come up with language to describe these different identities. We still crave labels. Linguists say that this has everything to do with the power of words to legitimize experiences, as if an idea only becomes valid once it's christened with a title. "It's clearly empowering for people to discover that thery're not the only ones having an experience and that the experience can be named," explains UCSB gender and language scholar Lal Zimmman.

s.69 – ... gender differs not only from person to person but also between entire cultures, depending on how certain bodies and behaviors are interpreted (through languageeee!!!)