This whole language deconstruction as a tool of oppresion against women is a load of horseshit, and nothing more.
We start with the intellectual works of Focault and Jacques Derrida, and their inquiries into what language that pervades modern days says about the attitudes that occured during its origins.
Thus this form of semantic archeology aquired it’s valid origins. Implied in the forms and mores of language are the thought processes of the people and times, as well as the social conventions that originated the phrases.
What are not carried within the language are the thought processes and attitudes of those to whom the language is handed down after it’s originations. Phraseology reflects orgins only, not current usage. Terms may be loaded, but usage isn’t. Archaic and outmoded forms perpetuate, though their meanings and connotations change.
“Queer” is now a source of unity amongst gay people, while gay becomes the perjorative. “Whipping boy,” and “scapegoat” have their origins in slavery and mean much the same as “nigger,” but don’t carry the same connotations merely because of random convention. If you don’t believe that you’re being a dodo, because without the conventions, pandemonium ensues. That’s the bad shit, or, perhaps, the straight dope.
Foccault and Derrida understood this, and their examinations focussed on the mental constructs inherent in the origins of language. Usage changes, in much the same way I rent out what used to be a one room shoolhouse as living quarters in the corner of my property. The fact that my carriage house was at one time a pig-pen in no way reflects my opinion of any guests I may have staying there. My old dairy barn is now a horse stable, and the rat runs and milk ways lie dormant.
The interest in these origins is mere archeology. The guests in my guest house do not become swinelike, nor do I impose swinish thoughts on them by letting them stay there. The people in the schoolhouse do not become more educated by living there, and my horses do not moo as the result of their living in a dairy barn.
These same things apply to the archeology or deconstruction of language to the same degree as they do to the archeology of builidings.
Fast forward to modern American intellectuals of the 50s 60s and 70s many of whom influenced by marxist philosophy sought to free the proletariat of the American “free” society. These proletariat were of course women and minorities. Many, if not most of these efforts were merited and laudable.
It’s the funny irony of history that much of the work of the American Communist party which sought to overturn our society by revolution merely resulted in greater freedoms for all members of that society, and the proverbial more perfect union. More irony entails through the witch hunts which crucify this group, for it’s espionage and propaganda activities, inadvertently martyring it.
As it turns out the good that the party indavertenly did American society is forgotten, and while we all knew McCarthy was a paranoid ass, we also forget that Communist spies with ill-intent were actively sabatoging and seeking to overthrow our society with the ultimate goal of removing some of the very freedoms they were propagating.
Anyway, end result is a martyred and disenfranchised intellectual left and a stronger and more free American Society.
Who then to peer squintily through the “invisible panapticon” of language, as Michel Focault put it?
Enter Stanley Fish, Yale PHD, who these days brings down $230,000 a year as a Professor of “body parts, execretory functions, the sex trade, dildos, bisexuality, transvestitism, and lesbian pornography.”
But Fish is best known for his “reader-response theory” originating back from when we wasn’t trying to be so desperately germaine.
The great idea behind “reader-response theory” is that writtne works have absolutely no meaning inherent to themselves but only that concocted as a mental construct by the reader.
In other words, if you think The Constitution is a primer on pig-fucking, then it is.
Nice idea, huh? Brilliant.
This intellectual masturbation was largely met with the apathy it much deserved were it not picked up by another idiotic Yale PHD by the name of Judith Butler.
Judith Butler you may recall is most famous for her invention of the term “Womyn” to ostensibly free females from the inherent male-despotism that denies them their freedom as a diferent “species” and insists they must be “60% male.”
When Judith lost the support of popular feminism which took a disturbing turn towards rationalism she became the self-proclaimed diva of “queer studies” where sadly much of her rhetoric has been picked up and embraced. It seems the curse of every worthy cause to have its origins corroded by such quackery.
She continues to comically demonstrate her “performitivity” theory of language and sexual behavior as forms of anarchy to the amusement of many, and the alarm of many more rational scholars who several times in the past have been forced to gang up and communally refute as pure drivel one of her crazier ideas which enjoyed a surge of popularity in much the same Pokemon did. Most recently she won the award for “Bad writing” from the journal of Philosophy and Literature for one of her more egregious attempts at scholarly obfuscation.
She defended herself by asserting that “Ponderousness is a part of the phenomenological challenge of the text.”
Uh-huh.
So, when you play your little language Nazi games of deconstruction, you follow in the bold footsteps of Butler and Fish whose contibutions to philosophy and culture and the understanding of same are akin to the use of leeches, bleeding, and medicinal uses of ingested mercury.
You’re engaging in pseudoscience, quackery, and drivel.
