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.