The body as history and memory: a gendered reflection on the choreographic ‘embodiment’ of creating on the socially constructed text of the South African body

Abstract

As early as 1980 American radical feminist Dale Spender, set linguistic world on its paternal head with her seminal Man Made Language (1980). Arguing against notion of being a neutral means to explain a pre-given fix 'real' world outside of us, language, as Spender claimed, was a weapon appropriated by patriarchy which diminished range of women's thoughts and being in world. She argued that the liberation of women is rooted in liberation of language (1980: 29). She claimed linguistic terrain for feminism as a need to study possible sex difference in of men and women, sexism embedded in of men and women, and mechanisms of women's oppressions through language. While Spender's position has been critiqued within feminism itself (see Assiter (1985) as one such example) for being, perhaps, a little too simplistic, what Spender did do was begin feminist postmodern concern with and how we 'speak world we inhabit', and its very profound link to representivity, knowledge and power.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.