Excavating sexual difference in language and thinking

Abstract

AbstractThe essay questions the predominant perception of human thinking as a gender-neutral enterprise. It holds that sexual difference is deeply engrained in language and thinking, regardless of the biological sexual identities of those who express those thoughts. The essay critiques the traditional thought for superficially linking the meaning of sexuality with biological gender. It opposes the characterisation of masculine thinking as man’s thinking and feminine thinking as woman’s. Masculine language expressions can sometimes happen from women writers, and male thinkers sometimes produce feminine writings. Biological bodily sexual identity is not a pointer to the psychical sexual behaviour of humans. Psychoanalytic gender theories explaining the inessentiality of human sexuality help this work to demonstrate that man’s and woman’s sex identities are arbitrarily produced by language. It exposes the process of the emergence of sexual difference in the human psyche, language, and thinking. To do that, this study anchors primarily on the reflections of Lacan, Nietzsche, and Saussure. Lacanian psychoanalysis is used as the theoretical source to explain the role of language in forming masculine and feminine identities. Nietzsche’s prioritisation of the value of natural existence, sensuality, and beauty over abstract truths propagated by masculine metaphysics enables us to explain how feminine experience differs from the masculine conception of truth. Saussure’s linguistic theory, which challenged the masculine representative function of language, is used to justify the essay’s claim that ‘affects’ created on the human body by objects of the world are the source of feminine linguistic expression. ‘Affects’ produce bodily intensities, from which new linguistic signs, metaphors, images, and idioms are formed, leading to imaginative reactivation of instinctual libidinal drives, which is considered the source of sexually different thinking.