That Issue, of Representation

Just a couple of quotations or so.  First, although we in the west tend to speak in terms of categories, that are binary, as if they are natural, our practices are ancient, going back to the man Aristotle, who profoundly believed that females naturally were inferior to males.  Second, from Aristotle to a bit more recently Ferdinand de Saussure to Jacques Lacan to Sigmund Freud and even to Jacques Derrida, there has been this presumption of representation by language, as if language itself is naturally so binary, so that there's the signified and the signfier, or, in more personal terms, as if more objective terms, the observer and his subject observed by him.  But fortunately, we all know there's more than just these two, than just the "either/ or" possibility in language.  So third, there are linguists and literary theorists such as Hélène Cixous, who get us beyond the (male-ish, constructed-as-if-"natural") binary.

Cette transformation du discours littéraire en discourse scientifique - qui sera (du moins, pour la tradition occidentale) à peu près definitivement formulé par Aristote - résulta d'un effort immense et vraiment langagier des Présocratiques, et cet effort devait être accompagné d'un effort linguistique, des élaborations théoriques des relations complexes entre l'univers, la pensée et le language, et entre la langue et son usage.

--Ferdinand de Saussure,

"Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure"

Revue Suisse de Linguistique Generale

et

Société genèvoise de linguistique

.....In his own investigation of "the life of signs in society," [Ferdinand] de Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics, saw language as a binary system consisting of an arbitrarily related signifier (the sound) and signified (the concept). Jacques Lacan developed this concept of the nature of the sign as both arbitrary and diacritical, a fundamental concept of sexuality in Freudian psychology, into a psychoanalytic theory that has had great impact on feminist theory. Jacques Derrida argued from the basis of this arbitrary and diacritical nature of the sign that language is essentially indeterminate--that there is no origin of meaning--and that there is no prelinguistic self. Because the issue of gender is fundamentally an issue of representation, for feminists the study of signs has become the study of gendered signs, and the arbitrary and diacritical nature of the sign is the site where semiotics and feminism intersect.
.....Arbitrariness means that the relation between the sign and its referent is neither a necessary nor natural one. From here, we could argue against claims of an essential nature of woman, because woman as a sign is a constructed category. A complication that arises from this constructedness is that, because the recognition of women as a distinct social group was a founding moment for feminism, the arbitrariness of the sign at first seems to threaten a fundamental aspect of feminism, that is, its claim that there is a category called woman. But by denaturalizing the category, the arbitrariness of the sign opens up for analysis the many ways in which woman is constructed as subject within an oppressive system.
.....In its diacritical nature, the sign takes on its meaning only out of its difference from other signs. This meaning-making through difference has led to the insight that the categories of man and woman stand in diacritical relation to one another and, moreover, that this binary opposition is at the heart of language. Hélène Cixous argued that Western philosophy and literary thought is a series of male/female oppositions which, no matter the terms, always translate in a patriarchal value system into positive/negative. To this binary system, Cixous opposes a multiple, heterogeneous difference as the feminine.

--Mary Anne Stewart Boelcskevy,

"Semiotics,"

Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory

edited by Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace