Showalter, E. (1998). Toward a feminist poetics. In D.H. Richter (Ed.), The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 2nd ed. (pp. 1374-1386). Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin's.al communication. However, analysis of signs, or symbols, of communication would be incomplete if it focused solely on their existence. The theoretical and analytical discourse of how language functions in the context of psychosocial interaction inevitably involves multiple attributes of experience that unfolds in a context of multiple social and cultural structures, symbols, and cues. When one of the factors of analysis is gender, given the abundance of evidence that access to social goods is quite differential between men and women, it is inevitable that the social and cultural implications of language use will entail social and cultural critique. The very terms society, social norms, or social organization, on this view, would have to be interrogated and qualified in analytic context. Who determines what these terms mean, how they are derived, how they are manipulated, and how they are experienced would be as critical to picking out their meaning as the mere accomplished fact of the designated terms. Thus does the role of language in culture intersect with the critique of social roles, including engendered roles. Gender-based analysis challenges assumptions and biases informing established social constructs and ideas about them, as well as attempts to delegitimate or otherwise forestall critique as "uninteresting, unimportant, and routine" (Smith, 1997, p. 344). Talking about such things--more important, reaching meaning about them--requires language and requires attention to how language affects and is affected by them. Englefield, F.R.H. (1977). Language: Its origin and its relation to thought. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Bonvillain, N. (2003). Language, culture, and communication. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Gender-based critiques of the |
