Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how language shapes societal views on gender roles.
Adrienne Rich's quote critiques the inherent sexism in language and grammar that positions males as the default or normative standard. This linguistic bias not only influences the perception of women's roles in society but also perpetuates a narrow mindset among men, keeping them insulated in a limited worldview that indeed devalues the contributions and identities of women.
In practice
In a feminist seminar discussing language and gender roles.
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'β
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life
You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.
The only time laughter is wicked is when it is turned against Him Who gave it.
My primary process of perceiving is muscular and visual.
I am only at home in the present.
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