TNTL 111

Agnes Verbiest

Een porseleinkast in de jungle. De verwoording van wetenschappelijke teksten over (het werk van) vrouwen

Abstract - Due to the inherent argumentativity of natural languages, gender-critical authors of texts about women (and their work) are confronted with the difficulty of expressing what they mean in a language that is 'gender-loaded', a language that is built to convey a viricentric ideology. Several categories of gender-loaded language use are distilled from recent texts about women, and the difficulties of coping with this kind of language usage are expounded. The rationale of this critical analysis is constructive. Knowledge of the gender-ideological tricks and pitfalls of their own language use as well as of the language of their sources, together with confidence in the principle of expressibility - what can be meant can be said - may help gender-critical authors to produce texts that say what the authors mean and that break down an ideology that they do not want to (re)produce.