PROFESSOR MITRANO FILOMENA – Module course II period

1.AWARENESS
The power of awareness  it leads to independence  to self-assessment  capacity for action to improve  success.
What prevents us from making the leap is fear  caused by lack of acceptance. Our singularity and differences form others become
an obstacle.
Making a leap means willing to look at yourself as a language user  put your knowledge to work.
Document that regulates language policy in Europe: THE COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK OF REFERENCE FOR LANGUAGES –
2001  attempted to switch the tone from rivalry (oppositions and dichotomies) to inclusiveness (connecting language to a
changing idea of plurality cultures)  results in the intercultural landscape.

The role of the language user

The common European framework project a pattern of neighboring others: learner’s achievement of friendship among differences.

In accordance with the action-oriented approach taken, it is assumed that the language learner is in the
process of becoming a language user, so that the same set of categories will apply. There is, however, an
important modification which must be made.

The learner of a second or foreign language and culture does not cease to be competent in his or her mother
tongue and the associated culture. Nor is the new competence kept entirely separate from the old. The
learner does not simply acquire two distinct, unrelated ways of acting and communicating. The language
learner becomes plurilingual and develops interculturality. The linguistic and cultural competences in
respect of each language are modified by knowledge of the other and contribute to intercultural awareness,
skills and know-how. They enable the individual to develop an enriched, more complex personality and an
enhanced capacity for further language learning and greater openness to new cultural experiences. Learners
are also enabled to mediate, through interpretation and translation, between speakers of the two
languages concerned who cannot communicate directly. (Common European Framework of Reference)

Crossing divides
Language user put their language competence into action, the document talks about the mental context between user and
interlocutor  “the need of communication presupposes a communication gap, which can however bridge because of the overlap,
or a partial congruence, between the two…”
The aim is to achieve and increase the area of congruence, such as values, beliefs, politeness conventions, social expectations etc.
Language user: possesses the capacity to transform differences and divisions, which might otherwise be experienced as walls, into
porous borders. He’s an interpreter, capable of negotiating and crossing divides  to develop openness toward others  THIS IS
INTERCULTURAL AWARENESS.

2.THE ORIGIN OF THE INTERCULTURAL LANDSCAPE

- post-World War II Europe
- hatred of certain groups of people
- rivarly among nations
- the self vs. other mindset
- Intercultural Europe and Multicultural America: undergoing a similar process

Sartre suggested that in social life everyone is required to have a recognizable identity, the problem with identity is that it causes
pain: of exclusion.
Language learner, according to the EU framework becomes a symbol of a subject open to otherness. Desires knowledge.
The language speaker takes up the position between, such as they become a mediator, entrusted with the task of transforming an
unscalable wall between people who cannot understand each other into a potential proximity.
The plurilingual subject is someone for whom speech, speaking another tongue, is a metaphorical from of touching  speech is
represented in its healing power, it touches what is foreign in neighboring entities.

……

moving out into a larger world

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 • Europe: process of regionalization (becoming one of the many regions of the world and being understood from the
outside)
• Multicultural US: discarding the image of a unitary culture grounded in
founding myth and in imperialist past

The relocation of America

Paul Giles argues for the study of American culture within a larger transnational context  a position of reflection and
estrangement  HOW American culture intersects with, modulates, and is in turn modulated by cultural practices in other parts of
the world.
In the early 2000s the study if the US shifted from a mythic to a comparative perspective.
“Virtualization”: change of perspective  in contrast to the isolationism

3.LANGUAGE: THE STRANGE RELATION

The speaking circuit
What is language?
Ferdinand Saussure, founder of the science of language  observed 2 aspects to language:
1. Language as a system of sign  more of an abstract idea  structures and set of rules
2. Speech  execution of each individual speaker

Course in general linguistics (1916): describes the linguistic phenomenon focusing on speech:
The diagram of the speaking circuit reflects the prominence given to speech.
It reminds us the biological dimension of language  language begins in the body (sound waves)

Speech:
1. Physical aspect – articulation of sounds
2. Psychological aspect – mental concepts associated with representations of linguistics sounds
Speech compromises 2 people  making it a SOCIAL FACT

Language is not complete in any speaker, it perfectly exists only within a collectivity  LANGUAGE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF
COMMUNICATION.

But is it?

Arguing with language

Roberto Esposito claims language is a “violent interference”  language splits what it names, it separates things from themselves
 it destroys the things it names  words take away from reality.
“The possession of a thing by language amounts to the nullification or invalidation of that thing”

In order to name the thing, language must transport it in a dimension that is different from reality. Since
words do not have a constitutive relation to the things that they name and that they mean, words take
away from things the reality which nevertheless they intend to express. (R. Esposito, Le persone e le cose).

Partly S.’ fault: Saussure found that the basic law is negation  each word, letter, sound, exists only because it differs from
something else  language is based on RELATIONAL IDENTITIES, on opposition of difference

For Esposito, it destroys not only a certain way of being of the thing but also its existence
We experience a sense of lack or limit  naming nullifies the singularity of things

When I say “tree,” I can never name that particular tree outside of my window, that specific tree in all its singularity

When we choose to learn a language it is because it can remedy precisely this sense that language fails us. We consciously or
unconsciously think that learning that language supplements our capacity to really name things and counter their destruction.

The speaker: feels that naming destroys the unique reality of the thing;

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Delectable speaker: believes that learning a language supplements our capacity to really name things and counter their
destruction. Believes that learning other words and things will help them name things, rather than destroy them.
Delectable speaker supplements and repairs.
He believes language affords the promise of friendship and hospitality.

The speaker vs the delectable speaker

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Speaker  an absence, never a satisfaction

What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the sunset! But who can go
where they are, or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and
ever.

It is the same among the men and women as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an
absence, never a presence and satisfaction” (Emerson, “Nature,” 1844, p. 245).

Emily Dickinson: Delectable speaker  the hospitable house language and the gratitude for the receiver.
Language is the dwelling of Man.

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –

Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –

For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

4.Imagining American English: A historical Overview

The vexed question: I’m unconsciously bilingual

HISTORY OF AMERICAN ENGLISH

1. the colonial period:
the early settlers
Declaration of Independence (1776)
the sovereign United States of America
2. the national period:
First US President George Washington (1789)
Civil War (1861-1865)
Reconstruction (1865-1877)
3. the international period:
end of the nineteenth century to the present.

Eliot, American poet and critic:

He humors on the 2 English

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American English as an object of representation
American English is compared to the British one as economic, direct, imaginative, action-oriented.
British stands for tradition and sophistication.
Language  representation  image in our mind, idea based on our impressions and speculation (Bailey) – also prejudices

The great migration

The theory of BRANCHING: Allen Walker Read  it describes the relationship of different forms of English, different branches world
spread  shifts the focus from comparison to historical and cultural experience  separation

The First Wave of Immigrants to New England, 1620 –

- Religious dissidents (Puritans/Separatists)
- Set sail from Plymouth in September 1620
- On board of the Mayflower
- 101 passengers, including both Puritan believers and non-believers
Ship’s arrival in New England (first English settlement: Plymouth Plantation)
They were the pilgrim fathers  religious dissent. Puritans in search of religious freedom and economic opportunity

William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation (composed between 1630 and 1651):

Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles . . . they had now no friends to welcome them, nor
inns to entertaine or refresh their weather-beaten bodys, no houses or much less townes to repaire to . . . it
was muttered by some that if they got not a place in time they would turn them and their goods ashore [and
return] . . . But may and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say - - Our Fathers were Englishmen
which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in the wilderness, but they cried unto the
Lord, and he heard their voice and looked on their adversities.

In this passage Bradford illustrates features that are commonly associated with the language in comparative discussions, namely
flexibility and freedom in spelling and grammar  Kovecses

FLEXIBILITY:
- altered spelling of ordinary words  “bodys, towned, entertaine”
- Mother’s tongue diachronic development  -e ending words  “firme, elemente, poore peoples, feete, againe”
Perhaps already anachronistic look, a process of the MIDDLE ENGLISH period, when many inflections were reduced to the “e”
vowel  became silent and disappeared in EARLY MODERN ENGLISH.

Transatlantic crossing  FREEDOM in grammar and spelling BUT also a sense of LOSS
Geographical separation pervaded language.
Bradford: arrival on a prophetic tone, presenting his fellows puritans as heroic exiles, heroic fathers who are ready to die for a
noble cause in an unknown land (“ready to perish in this wilderness”), counterbalanced by the fear of failure.
Loss + failure + winter cold + wild and savage

BIBLICAL AND LITERARY REFERENCES:

References from King James Bible
Seneca’s epistles  the raw emotion of relief at having survived the perilous journey.
Hamlet’s metaphor “a sea of trouble” from Act III, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s tragedy + direct quote.

The desirable supplement

Geographical separation translated into an internal split within the language  eng. Branched in 2
US ENG: strange and admirable, ancillary and exotic, secondary and desirable.

Thomas Twining (1796):

“An American speaks English with the volubility of a Frenchman. On my arrival in America I was much
struck with this peculiarity” (Twining qtd. in Read, “British Recognition of American Speech” 43).

Jonathan Boucher, Reminiscences of an American Loyalist (1786):

Americans as “eminently endowed with a knack of talking; they seem to be born orators” (qtd. in Read 43).

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Hugh Jones (1724), visitor in the State of Virginia:

“the Planters, and even the Native Negroes generally talk good English without Idiom or Tone, and can
discourse handsomely upon most common Subjects” (qtd. in Read 44).

Lord Adam Gordon, visitor (1764-65):

“the property of Language here surprised me much, the English tongue being spoken by all ranks, in a
degree of purity and perfection, surpassing any, but the polite part of London” (qtd. in Read 44).

Visitors observe:
- The phenomenon of uniformity:
- (a mode of speech that cuts across different social classes)
- ease and comfort of the speaker

Representations of the American Speaker (Twininig)

- a “voluble” speaker
- a sense of well-being
- a thriving receiver
- affirms his/her unhindered bond with language

The appeal of AE reached a peak in the 20th century modernity

H.L. Mencken  youth vocabs become corrupted through incursions of the American slang, film = the most menacing threat
vaunted English purity of speech in modernism. Language articulates through music and cinema, mass cultural forms.

Nicholas Cresswell:

Though the inhabitants of this Country are composed of different Nations and different languages, yet it is
very remarkable that they in general speak better English than the English do.

It is still more extraordinary that, in North America, there prevails not only, I believe, the purest
Pronunciation of the English Tongue that is anywhere to be met with, but a perfect Uniformity” (qtd. in
Read 45 qtd. in Read 45).

Using another language doesn’t only amount to acquiring info about society and culture but also it can activate the knowledge of a
proximity to a beneficial tie inherit in language as a human institution  borrowings, plurilingual matrix, multiplicity  charm of AE

5.Contact zones
1. The effects of separation
2. Contact zones
3. Borrowings
4. Contact and conflict
5. The “transfer of old words to new objects”
4. Regional variation

Solitude and the development of American English:

Noah Webster, Dissertation on the English Language: with notes historical and critical (1798)

… the new England common people … have been sequestered in some measure from the world, and their
language has not suffered material changes from their first settlement to the present time. Hence most of
the phrases used by Shakespeare, Congreve, and other writers who have described English manner and
recorded the language of all classes of people, are still heard in the common discourse of the New England
yeomanry. (Webster qtd. in Dillard 32-3)

Colonial lag hypothesis

- coined by A. H. Marckwardt in American English (originally published in 1958)

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 - Marckwardt built on the theory A. J. Ellis at the end of the nineteenth century: “a colony’s language was routinely more
conservative than that of its parent Country” (see our Textbook 58).

Doubts about the Colonial lag hypothesis

Michael Montgomery, “British and Irish Antecedents,” The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol.
VI: English in North America (2001):

Full assessment of the hypothetical archaicness of American English remains to be made. Most proponents
of colonial lag have had little conception of the heterogeneity of Colonial English and have generalized from
only a few examples. . . The evidence for colonial lag may reveal more about Britain, that is, how some uses
maintained in the Unites States have been displaced by fashions of the court, stage, or media and relegated
to local or nonstandard varieties. (107)

Archaic features in pronunciation

/r/-preservation: bar, color

use of /æ/ : fast, path

These features were abandoned in England in the 18th century but continued in the US

Archaic features in vocabulary  LOST in ENGLAND, RETAINED in the US

mad for “angry” (I am mad at him )

platter for “dish”

fall for “autumn”

CONTACT ZONES

The English of the United States developed along contact zones; it developed as a dynamic language, made of borrowings, against a
background formed by the languages spoken by groups other than the English-speaking ones: immigrants and native Americans.

(Delectable Speaker 59)

Contact with the indigenous people

“the Englishmen depended upon the Indians for many basic survival techniques such as acquiring food.”
J. L. Dillard, History of American English, 1992, p. 10.
Interdependence:
the settlers depended on the indigenous neighbors for the conduct of their daily life: it was thanks to the Indians that “the colony
endured.”
Suzanne Romaine, “Contact with Other Languages,” The Cambridge History of English, Vo. 7, 2001, p 158.

Samoset

William Bradford mentions Samoset, the Indian who showed the Pilgrims “how to set their corn, where to take the fish, and to
procure other commodities, and was a pilot to bring them to unknown places for their profit, and never left them till he died”
(Bradford qtd. in Romaine 158).

Did the colonists learn the language of the natives?

Roger Williams (1604?-1683), author of A Key into the Language of America: Or, an Help to the Language of the Natives in that
Part of America called New England (first published in 1643)

• an ethnographic document largely meant for the entertainment of audiences outside America;

Finding about the natives are cast in the form of moral instruction

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 Example from Williams, ending of chapter VII, “Of Parts of Body”:

Nature knowes no difference between Europe and Americans in blood, birth, bodies, &c. God having of one blood made all
mankind. Acts 17. and all by nature being children of wrath, Ephes. 2.

More particularly:
Boast not proud English, of thy birth and blood,
Thy Brother Indian is by birth as Good.
Of one blood God made Him, and Thee, and All.
As wise, as faire, as strong, as personall.
By nature wrath’s his portion, thine no more
Till Grace his soule and thine in Christ restore.
Make sure thy second birth, else thou shalt see
Heaven ope to Indians wild, but shut to thee. (Williams 61)

Comment to Williams

• didactic and moralizing intent of the European/natives comparison

• aimed at curbing the Europeans’ sense of superiority (“else thou shalt see/Heaven ope to Indians wild, but shut to thee”)

• Contact: tension, conflict kept under control

“Although European groups may have displayed chauvinistic feelings of superiority, their dependence upon and vulnerability to the
Indians forced them into certain cultural (including linguistic) compromises.”

J. L. Dillard, A History of American English 1992, p. 10.

CONTACT/CONFLICT

“the Englishmen depended upon the Indians for many basic survival techniques such as acquiring food.”

J. L. Dillard, A History of American English, 1992, 10

YET
THE PROCESS OF COLONIZATION:

• The indigenous peoples seen as linguistically incompetent

• The natives are like Caliban: the native’s “linguistic incompetence marks him as incapable of self-possession.”

Myra Jehlen, “The Literature of Colonization,” 43.

At times the natives are seen as superior orators:

Of their bravery and address in war we have multiplied proofs, because we have been the subjects on which they were exercised.
Of their eminence in oratory we have fewer examples, because it is displayed chiefly in their own councils. Some, however, we
have of very superior luster. I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero and of any more eminent orator, if
Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage superior to the speech of Logan, a Mingo chief, to Lord Dunmore.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (see our Textbook 61)

Borrowings from Native American languages

English/Native American languages contact

English/French contact  New Orleans as contact zone

American Indian influence: idioms

English/Spanish contact
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English/Dutch contact (New York/New Amsterdam)

English/German contact (Pennsylvania)

English/Italian (immigrants from southern Italy)

English/Yiddish contact zone (Jewish immigrants)

Annette Kolodny  The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975)

The transfer of old words to new objects  robin

Regional variation (rhoticity and non-rhoticity)

/r/-pronouncing and /r/-less speakers

- The first settlers came from the Southern regions of England and from the London area; they arrived in Massachusetts,
then in Virginia.
- These early settlers had no /r/ in their accents; the sound had begun to disappear in the southern part of England in the
sixteenth century. These settlers that populated much of the Atlantic seaboard.
- By contrast, the Scottish and the Irish were /r/-pronouncing and they moved inland, West or South-west becoming, “the
pioneers by excellence” (Kövecses 74).
- Hence: the phenomenon of rhoticity does not apply to the Boston area. Boston speech, like New York speech, is /r/-less.

6.The speaking subject

Subjectivity in language
Emile Benveniste refuse “language as an instrument of communication”  we tend to confuse discourse with language
As an instrument, it’s a fabrication, man-made, while language is not.
Language is not an addition to the human subject, not a cover  language defines the human subject

We communicate in discourse and what makes it possible is SUBJECTIVITY

SUBJECTIVITY  a property of language  to enable a human being to constitute themselves as SUBJECT
Language alone establishes the concept of EGO  “EGO” IS HE WHO SAYS “I”

Being a speaking subject implies a POLARITY OF PERSONS:

When I say I, I simultaneously posit a YOU  completely exterior to me, stands as an ECHO OF MYSELF

Saussure suggested there’s something beneficial that we receive with language  everyone is satisfied with the language they
receive  Benveniste argued that we are satisfied only in SPEECH, discourse  cos we receive its concealed precondition:
SUBJECTIVITY

GLORIA ANZALDUA
The heterogeneous linguistic landscape inherit form the past – contact zones – translates into the struggle to SPEAK
Gloria redefines the q of language as the PROBLEM OF VOICE  SOCIAL WORTH
As chicana she pointed to the limits of dualism  poem to reflect on dualistic confining view

Not all speakers have a beneficial relation to language!

The schools we attended or didn’t attend did not give us the skills for writing nor the confidence that we
were correct in using our class and ethnic languages. I, for one, became adept at, and majored in, English to
spite, to show up, the arrogant racist teachers who thought all Chicano children were dumb and dirty. (27)

Anzaldua who, in multicultural America, are pressured into being at the margins of society and are made to perceive themselves as
being at the margins. Benveniste’s discovery led to the discovery, by Anzaldúa and others, of the link between speech and power,
not in the sense that speech gives you power but in the sense that speech is colonized, traversed and infested by power. What
allowed Anzaldúa to have this insight about speech? The fact that she was particularly attuned to those aspects of human identity
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through which we normally perceive and imagine people: class, gender, skin color (race and ethnicity), and so no. Anzaldúa argues
that it is not as if we had language on one side and these traits on the other, but language is inseparable from them. An important
point: she not just saying that the way we speak determines the ways in which we are valued or discriminated against; she is also,
and importantly, arguing that, because of those differences, we experience a relation to language differently. That’s the point of
her letter to her hermanas, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers” (1980): even though she is a speaker,
she feels she does not belong to language, as if language was not natural to her. Let’s look at the letter closely.

2. The invisible speaker: Anzaldúa

First of all, let’s consider the title: “Speaking in Tongues.” It’s a metaphor to suggest something that is not easily or
immediately understood, something that, in fact, may not be understood. Perhaps, however, the most interesting Biblical meaning
comes from Saint Paul who, in the first letter to the community of the Corinthians (53–54 CE), writes: “For anyone who speaks in a
tongue does not speak to people but to God. Indeed, no one understands them; they utter mysteries by the Spirit” (1 Corinthians
14:2). Speaking in tongues here means saying something that people do not understand; the emphasis is on an audience that does
not understand because the speaker “utter[s]” a mysterious message, a message that is hard to decipher or decode. In the case of
Paul of course the mystery has to do with the religious, divine sphere. In Anzaldua’s case that mystery pertains to the experience of
writing:

21 mayo 80
Dear mujeres de color, companions in writing -
I sit here naked in the sun, typewriter against my knee trying to
visualize you. Black woman huddles over a desk in the fifth floor of
some New York tenement. Sitting on a porch in south Texas, a Chicana
fanning away mosquitos and the hot air, trying to arouse the smouldering embers of writing. Indian woman walking to school or
work lamenting the lack of time to weave writing into your life. lesbian, single mother, tugged in all directions by children,
lover or ex-husband, and the writing. (Anzaldúa 165)

The letter begins with a cluster of women of different ethnicities: Black, Chicana, Indian, Asian American, all united by the fact that
writing is difficult for them.

She examines the reason for that difficulty, considering how it might be due to their material conditions as disadvantaged people,
especially when compared to white women writers:

My dear hermanas, the dangers we face as women writers of color

are not the same as those of white women though we have many in
common. We don't have as much to lose - we never had any privileges.
I wanted to call the dangers "obstacles" but that would be a kind of
lying. We can't transcend the dangers, can't rise above them. (Anzaldúa 165)

Anzaldúa here points out the dangers and the obstacles, which seem unsurmountable for people who “never had any privileges.”
Yet, she finds that the reason why writing feels like a struggle is that she and the women she is addressing feel “invisible”; as if they
did not “even exist” (165). She explains:

Our speech, too, is inaudible. We speak in tongues like the outcast and the insane.
Because white eyes do not want to know us, they do not bother to
learn our language, the language which reflects us, our culture, our
spirit. The schools we attended or didn't attend did not give us the
skills for writing nor the confidence that we were correct in using our
class and ethnic languages. I, for one, became adept at, and majored in
English to spite, to show up, the arrogant racist teachers who thought all Chicano children were dumb and
dirty. (165-6)

Why are these women invisible and inaudible? Because there is something different about them vis-à-vis an ideal norm: they are
invisible because of their race, their ethnicity, their class, their gender, their sexuality. But Anzaldúa’s point – the scandalous
point – is that if one is invisible one is inaudible; one does not speak because on is not heard. Anzaldúa is saying that language is
not neutral; on the contrary, it buttresses and fosters existing hierarchies, existing exclusions, existing injustices. This is why it is not
enough to talk about the speaker or speakers. Not all speakers have a relationship with language. That is the point. Having a
relationship with language is not about being able to pronounce words; it is not about mastering words and sentences, or not just

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that. Rather, having a relationship with language means tapping a beneficial resource in language that is not just about the
articulation of words but makes you feel seen and heard. Benveniste calls that resource subjectivity in language.

Anzaldúa dramatizes precisely the concealed property theorized by Benveniste. She further specifies Benveniste’s polarity of
persons: in her scene, the You is external but also symmetrical to the I. The You, however, is embodied by the other woman, both
similar to the I (because of gender) and different from the I (because of the other differences that intersect gender). When gender
and its intersectional character is taken into consideration, what emerges is that the concealed, beneficial property of subjectivity
in language is shown to be linked to the event of recognition by another. Following up on Benveniste, she stresses that the
concealed property of language – subjectivity—is the possibility of recognition, and somehow suggests that this possibility of
recognition is the precondition of speech. But in doing so, Anzaldua is offering an unprecedented picture of multilingual America,
suggesting that the babel of languages and their multiplicity, in fact, makes us ignore how language works to exclude.

3.Speaking is existing: the feminist story of language

Anzaldúa’s insight is part of a much ampler feminist story of language which places center stage the notion of the speaking subject.
This feminist story first points to dynamics of power that structure social relations and then tries to repair the capacity of language
to wound its speakers. For this reason the feminist story of language acknowledges, like Benveniste, a beneficial property of
language and claims access to it.

As a movement of emancipation feminism placed language center stage reminding everyone in the public sphere how important
the notion of the speaking subject is. There are wonderful archives through which it is possible today to reconstruct that climate,
during second wave feminism, which started out in the United States and spread to the rest of the world, when language was not
simply an abstract notion or a system of signs but held the promise of social change. A representative photograph by Diana Davies,
Women’s Liberation March in New York City, in 1972, meets the eye with a choreographic ensemble of women moving and
speaking. Similar images amplify the linguistic and corporeal achievement of a unique, embodied person designating herself as ‘I’,
who comes forward in a spatial vista and is acknowledged by another.

The speaking subject is a position to struggle for and to achieve. This is illustrated by countless images of public intellectual like
Gloria Steinem, or Angela Davis and Andrea Dworkin. For these American women to speak amounted to existing; speaking meant
appearing, becoming visible. It testified, as Rosi Braidotti, puts it to “the desire to be.”

Genealogies from the archive

70s – 80s feminisms began to change academic approaches to language  social change
photo with the microphone amplify linguistic and corporeal achievement of a person designing herself as an I

Hannah Arendt  speaking is existing  appearing, becoming visible

Concerned herself with creating the conditions for language to become our friend  paved the way for Anzaldua

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