Language And Gender

Language and Gender: Feminist Perspectives Lison K.V With the 1960s, the women’s movement became a major political force. The movement took various issues for the gender-debate. Literary critics influenced by the movement under took a whole new project. This include the re-reading the canon of English literature to expose the patriarchal ideology which made male centered writing possible. They argue that the literary texts reproduce social biases that see the woman as only the other of the male. In terms of language and epistemology, the feminists seek to formulate a gender which will reject patriarchal terms. It will help to create a female language based on female subjectivity. The French feminists associated with language and gender are Luce Irigaray,Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva. In feminism the concept of gender and sex are deferent terms. Sex is a biological construct but gender is a sociological construct which makes social differences (male and female).Gender is a cultural construct. Gender makes a personal identity of an individual in a society. Language is a male thought and male centered.Men developed and masculinized language. Patriarchy is called sexual colonialism. It is an internal colonialism like racism, classism, and sexism. In patriarchy women are sexually colonized by men. Here men are colonizers and women are their colonies and the colonized is compelled to use the language of the colonizer. Women borrow male centered language to express their self. Male centered language is the oppressive language. Women writers have no any models, they follow the stereotype women created by patriarchy where women are not represented realistically they are either a Sitha or a Savithri. Feministic writers like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have written ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ a woman not following the main stream language, so she is considered as a mad woman and she is not a stereotype but a different woman. The immediate necessity is the development of a language, a language which is gynocentric. Female centered language is used as revisionist myth. Myth is tale which commonly share the same meaning. Writers use myth because it gives objectivity and it can psychologically convince the reader. There are two uses of a myth ordinary and revisionist. In ordinary use of myth the meaning indented by the author is converge with the meaning accepted by the society. In revisionist use of myth the meaning indented by the author is differ from the meaning accepted by the society. Revision takes in three levels they are Re-interpretation of a myth, re-imaging of a character and re-visulization of myth. In any myth all three levels may be taken.Women writers use re-visionist use of myth to erase the negative image of women created by male writers. In Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics she attacks the male biases in Freud’s psycho-analytic theory and also analyses selected passages from D.H Lawrence, Henry Miller and Jean Genet as revealing the ways in which the authors, in their fictional fantasies ,aggrandize their aggressive phallic selves and degrade women as submissive sexual objects. Women needed to consider what it meant to be a woman? How women are culturally and socially constructed? What are the female traits that make a woman as woman. Simon de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex questioned the othering of women by western philosophy. They recognize that merely unearthing women’s literature did not ensure its prominence. In order to assess women’s writings the amount of the preconceptions inherent in a literary canon dominated by male beliefs and male writers needed to be re evaluated. Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique(1963),

Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics(1970), Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own are critiques that questioned cultural, sexual, and intellectual stereotypes about women. In Susan Gilbert’s essay Literary Paternity she examines the way in which male dominated society has imposed masculine meaning upon language. In literary history she finds that a number of male writers have attributed their creative capacity to their bodily configuration. Gilbert documents that the pen is a metaphoric penis and vice-versa. By linking creative writing with penis male writers insist that writing is a biological act, that is rooted in the male body. Gilbert suggests that women cannot use pens ( associated with penis) they could write with milk and with blood. Julian of Norwich in her A Revelation of Love creates a mother text in which she employed images of motherhood and maternity. In chapter twelve of A Revelation of Love Julian associates herself with Mary watching the bleeding Christ on the cross. Her description of Jesus employs feminine images until the distinction between Marry and her son blurred. If we consider Jesus as mother figure we can interpret the hot blood of Christ as milk, nourishing the Church and his spiritual children. If we further recognize that medieval medicine considered breast milk to be processed blood, the Julian’s feminization of Christ is complete.