« Les femmes peuvent-elles parler ? »

Le problème de l’expression linguistique des identités de genre chez Monique Wittig et Judith Butler

Abstract

This article starts with the idea defended by Monique Wittig that some subjects –and among them women- can’t speak in the dominating language, can’t say “I”, or this will provoke a performative contradiction. We will analyse how Judith Butler comments on this idea and criticizes it in Gender Trouble. Butler’s aim, just like Wittig’s, is to denounce all forms of gender domination transmitted by language, but she contests the idea that we can escape from the dominating language. Since subjects are always already defined by language, “liberation” is impossible. Butler substitutes the idea of “resignification”, and opens the way to a politic of performativity enabling us to struggle against an excluding language.