Plz elaborate on the language thing I love to hear your thoughts!!
Ok, I will distract myself from my schoolwork for a moment, if you insist... :)
This ask is referencing a post I made that said this:
"Sometimes I am floored by the erasure of the female perspective in everyday language. I find myself literally speechless, unable to describe what I am experiencing and understanding. It wasn't always like this for women. We used to have words. We used to have a grammar. We used to have a common sense of ourselves as females. Not even that long ago. We can reclaim this"
For example, what I was thinking of when I dashed off that post was an old Scots song often called The Witches' Reel. This song (supposedly) came from the time of the first major persecutions of women as witches in Scotland.
The first verse goes like this (in the original version - this website is my source):
"Cummer gae ye before, cummer gae ye,
Gin ye winna gae before, cummer let me,
Ring-a-ring-a-widdershins
Linkin lithely widdershins,
Cummers carlin cron and queyn
Roun gae we!"
The image this verse describes is women of all ages linking arms and dancing around a circle.
Carlin and crone both refer to old women, "witches", hags, etc. Queyn / quean used to refer to a young maiden / unmarried woman. The word "cummer" means woman, too; it actually is a specific word referring to a female friend of a woman.
It's defined on wiktionary like this:
noun Scotland a female companion or intimate (of another woman) noun Scotland lass, the feminine equivalent of "fellow"
The word "cummer" comes from an old French word "commère", which now means something like godmother. But it used to refer to a woman's companion, what was sometimes in English called a "gossip", which now holds negative connotations (shocker). A gossip was a female friend, but not just anybody's female friend; a woman's woman-friend.
What's interesting to me is that the referent is female, implying that there once existed a distinct linguistic feminine perspective. Women had our own words to describe ourselves in reference to one another.
A feminist linguist, Muriel Schulz, observed the phenomenon of words referring to women eventually taking on negative connotations, even when they originally were positive or neutral. She named this phenomenon "semantic derogation". It's one of the ways that men control language and make it more difficult to speak clearly about our lives and relationships as women. It demonstrates the deep societal power imbalance that men are able to define women and change the meaning of our words, but women do not have the social power to define men. Male-generated definitions override female-generated definitions. Not only are female-generated definitions seen as illegitimate, women are defined as being incapable of definition.
"Queyn" or "quean" also originally meant a female friend, but eventually the meaning was diminished. It became synonymous with "slut" / "wench" / prostitute -- in essence, a general pejorative term for "ill-behaved" women who deviate from social expectations of proper female behavior. The implication is that any woman who does not behave is seen as free for public use -- not deserving of respect or protection. This same derogation occurs to most words that were generated by women.
I can't find Muriel Schulz's original 1975 essay online, but if you look up her name and the title ("The Semantic Derogation of Woman") you can find others who have written about her concept. (For something semi- but not totally related, Janice Raymond has a fascinating essay in her book A Passion For Friends where she examines the patriarchal semantic grouping of lesbians and prostitutes in the same category of "deviant woman").
All this is to say, men have access to neutral or positive terms for one another - dude, guy, fellow, lad, mate. And when you look at the language, women only have terms with negative connotations. But once upon a time we did have our own terms that could be neutral, positive, affectionate, etc. We had the ability to describe our lives and relationships with more precision and deeper complexity. But as these terms become pejorative, it becomes socially unacceptable to name our relationships with other women, thus suppressing our ability to speak freely of our lives. Our perspective becomes dominated by male definitions; we lose definition of our own perspectives. Our world as women shrinks.
But that these terms exist at all -- quean, gossip, cummer, and there are others -- implies the presence of a world that men (and many women) deny the existence of entirely: a world of women, as central to ourselves, from which we derive and create meaning in relation to each other. There is no specific name for this, other than what I sometimes call "women's culture(s)".
Men's culture is so artificially inflated (I could make a joke about cultural Viagra here but I'll refrain... for now) that it appears as if it's the only thing that exists. We call it "mainstream culture," but it is in fact a culture of male domination. All other cultures -- i.e. those generated within a context of female interrelationship -- are marginalized, demeaned, and erased from collective awareness. We are relegated to the cultural subconscious; hidden within the deep mind, the mysterious, the occult. Unnamed and unspeakable.
But women's cultures are not dead. As long as women are alive and breathing and creating things and speaking to each other, we will have women's cultures. But in order to make these cultures conscious again, to take control of them, we have to name what we see and know. This means we must do the personal and political work of reclaiming creative agency over our use of language.
This can and should be approached as a fun, playful, artistic pursuit. It is liberating to invent language. I mean this beyond just words; there is so much more to language than words. It is a creative process and it is our birthright. Much of the work of Mary Daly, especially her later work, is about empowering women to create language as well as reviving old terms associated with or generated by women's cultures. Her book written with Jane Caputi called "Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language" is a very fun and fascinating meta-exploration of women and the English language.
I could write so much more on this, but I'll stop here for now. 🤭 Thanks for sending in this ask!
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