post x: L'ecriture, l'ecriture, l'ecriture

I recently read a somewhat interesting article called "L'Ecriture Feminine" by Ann Rosalind Jones, which discusses the ways in which the language we operate within is intensely patriarchal.  This isn't necessarily at the root of feminine inequality (although it may help to perpetuate it), but it's worth observing and maybe deducing that it is not necessarily the most-suited language choice out there for all of us.  Mostly, it is not for women who have at any time felt an overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction with the language in which we operate.

All of that said, I do not see how this is remotely limited to women.

The article of course dwelled upon the construction of our very language making actual sexual equality not a default mindset, but I felt like it was overlooking the default that language places all of us under and how this has power over our interactions with other humans, with nature, and with ourselves.

It is definitely not good or at least not wordily courteous when the normative is set to the male by default, so that when a woman (person) even refers to herself, she (or he) verbally refers to herself as other and may even think of herself as other.  But don't men do this too, when they don't fit in with a precise definition of the normative that the language has provided? Our language also doesn't just do this to women, but it does it to men, as well as to all things, so that when something, someone, some concept, some abstraction, receives a word, it becomes further removed from that thing which is actually is.  So the male, as well as the female, the thing, gets defined in terms of something that is other from what it actually is.  Answer to this?  Fuck if I know.  But yeah, language does have some patriarchal patterns that might be a little better serving if neutral...better serving to both women and to men.  But who's the neutral?  Then would there be a separate neutral, or a neutral that encompasses both?  I like the latter, but the latter in our language tends to be the male term.

So naturally, this becomes a piece of work for the poet who must function within the boundaries so clearly perceived as simply false and un-encompassing of that which things truly are.  (Although so little can truly be elucidated, nor should it be.)

I'm really, really tired of talking about this already.  Topics concerning femaleness and maleness and language exhaust me like no other, and I never get to the bottom of anything, I contradict myself, I disagree with myself, I can sound hyper-feminist, and at times even chauvinistic in my own way, because words fucking fail.  So do people.  So do machines,  and so do systems, eventually.   And I am a person, using language, a system to try and explain something concerning exactly these facts.  Whoa man.