SOURCE: Cameron, Deborah. “Is There an Anglo-American Feminist Linguistics?” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 12, no. 2 (fall 1993): 223-27.

In the following essay, Cameron contrasts different feminist theories of language in terms of Moi's linguistic analysis in Sexual/Textual Politics.

Since I am a linguist rather than a literary critic, I want to consider the term “Anglo-American” in terms of its application to feminist theories of language: theories that arguably hold a central place in the more general project of feminist criticism. So, is there an Anglo-American feminist linguistics?¹

Toril Moi, of course, implies that there is. She uses the phrase as part of a section heading in chapter eight of Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985), explicitly contrasting what she calls the Anglo-American empirical approach to language with the Lacanian approach as reworked by Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva.² She does not consider whether there is a further contrast between...