Blackwell Reference Online

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Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it.(Wittig 1992, p. 78)Most of us – those of us who are women; to those who are men this will not apply – probably check the F box rather than the M box when filling out an application form. It would hardly occur to us to mark M. That would be like cheating or worse, not existing, like erasing ourselves from the world … For since the very first time we put a check mark on the little square next to the F on the form, we have officially entered the sex-gender system, the social relations of gender and have become engendered as women; that is to say, not only do other people consider us as females, but from that moment on we have been representing ourselves as women. Now I ask, isn't that the same as saying that … while we thought that we were marking the F on the form, in fact the F was marking us?(de Lauretis 1987b, pp. 11–12)Language matters to feminism because language is a structure of significances that governs our lives. It contains and conveys the categories through which we understand ourselves and others, and through which we become who and what we are. Our linguistic practices are constituted largely by inferences which in turn constitute or contribute to our understanding of the connections (causal and otherwise) between things. These inferential roles and patterns, which are normatively ... log in or subscribe to read full text