Articulating Difference

Enriches contemporary debates about gender and language by probing the histories of the philosophy and sciences of language. Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonical literature and philosophy, Sophie Salvo uncovers the prehistory of the inextricability of gender and language. Taking German discourses on language as her focus, she argues that we are not the inventors but, rather, the inheritors and adapters of the notion that gender and language are interrelated. Particularly during the long nineteenth century, ideas about sexual differences shaped how language was understood, classified, and analyzed. As Salvo explains, philosophers asserted the patriarchal origins of language, linguists investigated ¿women¿s languages¿ and grammatical gender, and literary Modernists imagined ¿feminine¿ sign systems, and in doing so they not only deemed sex-based divisions to be necessary categories of language but also produced a plethora of ge