In feminist linguistic analysis, women's speech has often been characterized as “powerless” or as “over-polite”; this paper aims to challenge this notion and to question the eliding of a feminine speech style with femaleness. In order to move beyond a position which judges speech as masculine or feminine, which are stereotypes of behavior, I propose the term “discourse competence” to describe speech where cooperative and competitive strategies are used appropriately.

The form of the sentence, as it is understood in contemporary semantics and linguistics, is functional. This paper interprets the metaphors in which Frege shows what the functional sentence means, arguing that Frege's sentence is neither an adequate translation of natural language nor of use in feminist theorizing.

As radical feminists seeking to overcome the linguistic oppression of women, Rich and Daly apparently shared the same agenda in the late 1970s; but they approached the problem differently, and their paths have increasingly diverged. Whereas Daly's approach to the repossession of language is code-oriented and totalizing, Rich's approach is open-ended and context-oriented. Rich has therefore addressed more successfully than Daly the problem of language in use.

Looking at the metaphorical similarities between abortion statutes and copyright law reveals reproductive laws’ stake in property ideologies. “Fair use” provisions in copyright law are analogous to abortion rights, delimiting the extent to which a non-owner (one who copies, a mother) can exert control over material “belonging” to another. The similarity suggests that the way to understand abortion fury is as a manifestation of property rights.

This essay addresses the troubling and uncanny figure of Mother in feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, literary criticism, and real life. Readings of feminist literary criticism and the films Alien and Aliens explore the liminality of Mother and the consequences for feminist thought and practice of the persistent narrative modes (the sentimental and the gothic) locatable in all of these discourses on/of Motherhood.

This essay situates Kristeva's theory of semiotics in the context of the controversial debate about the status of the maternal body in her work. I argue that, if we rethink the opposition between the semiotic and the symbolic as the relation between the trace and the sign, it becomes clear that the maternal semiotic is irreducible either to the prelinguistic plenitude or to the alternative symbolic position. The second part of the essay develops the connection between Kristeva's linguistic theory and the alterity of the maternal body, articulated here as the in-fold of the other and the same.

Psychoanalysis has long cited poetry as the expressive vehicle for unconscious production. This article addresses the sexual politics of psychoanalyses conjoining of poetry and the “feminine.” The argument of this text is that the coupling of the “feminine” and the poetic in Lacanian discourse is a metaphorical double cross which most often leaves “woman” at a loss for words.

Confessional modes of self-representation have become crucial in feminist epistemologies that broaden and contextualize the location and production of knowledge. In some versions of confessional feminism, the insertion of “I” is reflective, the product of an uncomplicated notion of experience that shuttles into academic discourse apersonal truth. In contrast to reflective intrusions of the first person, reflexive confessing is primarily a questioning mode that imposes self-vigilance on the process of self positioning.

By juxtaposing readings of selected feminist critics with a reading of Ovid's account of Philomela's rape and silencing, this essay interrogates the rhetorical, political, and epistemological implications of the feminist “we.” As a political intervention that comes into being as a response to women's oppression, feminism must posit a collective “we.” But this feminist “we” is best understood as an impersonal, performative pronoun whose political force is not derived from a knowable referent.

This essay focuses on how we embody the language we speak: how an audience “reads” the body of a speaker as it both constructs the positionality of that speaking subject and construes that subject's discursive authority. Buildingon the work of Linda Brodkey and Michelle Fine, 1 explore what is at stake when university students harass a faculty member by accusing that teacher of not embodying authority in the proper form (body).

A new collection of critical essays from bell hooks takes as its theme the deep longing for a critical voice. I explore some motifs that operate across the divergent topics of her essays. She writes of the dangers of commodification, of “reassuring” images, of individualism. I also explore the paths of hooks's uniquely black postmodernism: her critique of various essentialisms, her philosophically important conception of subjectivity, and her beautiful and powerful transformations of multiple discourses.

This essay participates in a feminist postcohnial critical historiographyfepistemol’ ogy by providing a critique of The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. The essay considers Spivak's success in interrogating her own position as a leading postcohnial critic as she engages in dialogues with various people. Spivak's commitment to cross-cultural exchanges is undeniable. However, at times the resurgence of her authoritative subject position deflects productive tensions generated by careful scrutiny of the category postcohnial.

Fox-Genovese, Kaminer, and Riley all write the history of feminism as a history of conflict between feminists who desire to deny difference in favor of equality and those who desire to celebrate difference. And they all ask what this contradiction lying at the heart of feminist theory implies for the practice of feminist politics. These works reveal the need for feminists who engage this debate to be self’-Conscious in their formulations.

This essay discusses the place of popular culture, especially visual representation, in theories of female subjectivity and examines two recent works on women and popular culture as representative of two primary critical and methodological approaches to the female subject. The essay considers the limitations and implications of both qualitative communication research and text-based feminist criticism and the need to construct a dialogue between them.