To Speak Is Never Neutral

French speakers know that nouns have genders and that verbs have masculine and feminine endings. It's different for English speakers, an "ungendered" tongue that often hides the powerful gendering of every speech. If our society is rife with gender inequities, can the language we speak really be innocent? Speech is never neutral. Feminist philosopher, linguist, and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray is renowned for her analyses of language, studies that can be precise and poetic at the same time. In this volume of her work on language, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, she is concerned with developing a model that can reveal those unconscious or pre-conscious structures that determine speech. A key element of her method is the comparison of spoken and written language, through which she teases out the sexual and social configurations of speech.To Speak is Never Neutralbrings to English speakers important feminist and psychoanalytic insights by one of France's most provocative thinkers.

Luce Irigaray is Director of Research in Philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris