We nowadays hear the words”feminism” and “gender” in the public sphere more than ever before. Yet they are used in ways so diverse that they end up meaning one thing and… its opposite.
Had we been taught language pragmatics at school, we might find it easier to distinguish whether we are dealing with healthy plurality… or a voiding of meaning.
In the media, and at dinner parties, people seem to believe that feminism is divided because girls do not know how to agree. But while we chalk it up to“girl stuff”, we do not assume that with the irruption of postmodernity we have been experiencing a clash of paradigms so strong that not only has it challenged the definitions of words but also the criteria we validate definitions with. Gender has thus become the battleground in a crisis of meanings that affects every movement towards progress. Whether grounded on modernity or postmodernity, we hear such antagonistic definitions of “gender”, “woman” and “feminism” in everyday life, in politics and in law– that women of the same family no longer know how to talk to each other. Even using them in singular or plural implies a different ideological position. When we make diametrically different assumptions and we take them for granted, there can only be conflict or total incomprehension.
A clash of paradigms is not a simple matter of generation gap, let alone a question of nuances to be settled over a cup of coffee before March the 8th.
Are we dealing with reconcilable theories? Are they such different and opposing agendas that we will have to root for just one as the road to equality? Or will we have to assume there are different movements and agree on language that differentiates them?
Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, a veteran militant of what is now called “classic” or (contemptuously) “hegemonic” feminism, thinks that her daughters are going straight to the Big Bad Wolf with their “neo-language”, their “neo-genres” and their batukadas. The girl’s millenial aunts believe that their mother is blinded by “bourgeois”, “cis”, “biologicist” and “prudish” prejudices.
Red Riding Hood, no longer little, listens to them, and as she would say, freaks out. How can they end up so hurt when we all want equality?
She has had to grow up in a society full of paradoxes. There is a lot of talk about feminism, but never before had girls been so “wrapped up” in pink. There is clearly a feminist fourth wave… but Western parliaments seem more concerned with defining – or avoiding – the terms “woman” or “mother” than with passing anti-sexist measures. While the word”empowerment”is on everyone’s lips… violence is on the rise. Meanwhile she doesn’t understand very well what they explain at school about gender: is it biological, is it innate, is it chosen, is it explored…? She is told that there are no boy things and girl things… but she hasn’t failed to notice that it is almost always women caring for the sick or that the social value of girls seems to lie on how tight your buttocks are.
She has many, many questions… and she hears such different and conflicting answers….
This is her mother’s blog. As a linguist, she wantsto understand the changes in meaning construction that have brought us to the current terminological chaos. She wants to provide Little Red Riding Hood with tools to understand the tenets and presuppositions underlying the neolanguage that the girl’s millennial aunts are passing on to her, together with its implications and consequences. But she also wants to acquaint the teenager with what her grandmother has to say. A grandmother being currently cancelled and accused of hatred by the new generations, because when empathy ignores or confuses other reasons, it can become as totalitarian as they say reason might become.
And why would we need to dialogue with grandma?, some might think.Why should the way previous generations thought and named things work for today’s world? It might not. But in order to brand something as useful or useless… we had better understand it. Or else we run the risk of throwing the baby – or rather the baby girl – away with the bathwater.
This concerned linguist mother would love to explain feminism to Red Riding Hood in that pleasant, simple, 140-character way that almost everyone now asks for… but she cannot. Conversation with her on equality cannot possibly flow in a world without consensual definitions. So you can only give her analytical tools to understand who defines and what for. Because while debates grounded on analytical clarity are productive, confusion always feeds the wolves.
The Little Red Riding Hood who asks questions in this blog is a teenage girl; but Red Riding Hood is any person observing, in perplexity, the brutal linguistic changes that have affected the terms “woman”, “gender” and “feminism” – curiously, not the word “man” – and anybody who needs clarity so as not to get lost in the forest and end up feeding the wolf.
Hopefully, by analysing how we construct language, and how what we define – or what defines us – affects us, we will find some keys to a responsible, consensual and shared language that advances towards equality.
Hopefully, from there we will be able to convey clear messages to young people. And may those young people… read them.