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“Pronouns, past struggles, new practices: political continuity or radical change?”, Claudine Raynaud, Université Paul-Valéry, France
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Descriptif
I would like to compare two second wave French feminists’ thought and LGBTQIA+ theorizing and practice regarding pronouns and ponder their possible interactions. My focus will be the work of Luce Irigaray (1930- ) and Monique Wittig (1935-2003) in the 70s-80s. These two French feminist thinkers have been chosen among others notable French feminists (for example Beauvoir, Cixous, Kristeva) for their incursion into and reflection upon language and subjectivity. According to them, language, run through patriarchal power, cannot speak/write the female subject, the lesbian subject, the “I” of speech and writing.
Luce Irigaray is first and foremost a philosopher. Her training in psychoanalysis, psychology, linguistic and literature, as well as her writing, singles her out as one of the most incisive theorists on the question of language (hence on the use of pronouns). Unconscious and pre-conscious structures determine speech: consequently, To Speak is Never Neutral (1985). Monique Wittig belongs to another school of feminism: radical materialist feminism. A co-founder of the MLF (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes), Wittig is historically one of the most prominent thinkers of heterosexuality and lesbianism (La Pensée straight, [1978] 2001). Her reflection on pronouns and her practice of a language that reflects her theoretical insights led her to use of the third person feminine plural: “elles” = they in Les Guérillères (1969), and to a deconstruction of “je” into “j/e” in Le Corps lesbien (1973).
While the contemporary conversation and polemics around the use of pronouns may be traced to the history of feminist thought on language, its inscription in a ritual of self-naming, its claim for a different civic identity, play out on a different arena (to take up Wittig’s phrase, the title of the 2024 anthology of her writings, In the Enemy’s Arena). It is this difference and the echoes between these two political moments that I wish to investigate.
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