Aditi Joshi
Introduction
The standardized definition of an ‘ideology’ is a set of beliefs and ideas, often used politically, both in small groups and larger societies: to study an ideology is to study the ways in which meaning creates and sustains power. In Eagleton’s (1988: 5) definition, a dominant group is able to sustain and mystify their power using subversive means, making the way things are seem natural and inevitable. For the purposes of this essay, the dominant ideology that I will be examining is American patriarchy. Specifically, I will investigate how language is used to create and force a gender binary with an explicit hierarchy and how artists can subvert these forces. I am interested in exploring how language enforces power on three different levels: the semiotic, the metaphorical, and the narrative and how it becomes a way for ideology to mask itself. Since language is part of our daily lives we are unable to recognize it as being used for domination. Analyzing language through a Marxist lense, Voloshinov (1973: 13) argued that the word was the ideological phenomenon par excellence and further argues that language affects how we view our own identity and consciousness. Because the dominant American ideology is enforced through male power structures, its language subverts women. There is resistance, however, in feminist art and below I will examine the work of three artists—Barbara Kruger, Sophia Wallace and Jenny Holzer—to argue that we can see artists using language in their pieces to achieve feminist aims at each of the different levels to dismantle dominant masculine ideologies. What I have concluded is that through their work, they engage the public in a discourse that is otherwise not possible, bringing awareness to the hidden feminine.
Fighting Semiotics: Barbara Kruger
Language can be analyzed semiotically as a system of signs that exist socially. These signs create the smallest units of meaning, our building blocks of language. For semioticians, language hinges on the relationship between a signified and a signifier. The word, the signifier, serves as a representation of a specific object or thing, the signified. Together these two concepts become the sign, or the outcome meaning (Saussure, 1996). Because there exists only one principle signifier for either gender (i.e. “man” or “woman”) each word links to one principle signified concept or image. In using these inherently gendered words, we translate all women and, similarly, all men, to one signified image, rather than the complex gender spectrum that exists. Additionally, since there exists little flexibility between these words (one must be either “man” or “woman”), it is difficult for society to understand the signified of a person who does not exist within this binary. While the prevalence of the singular “they” is gaining popularity, it is by no means universal and often times grammatically awkward. When people use it to refer to themselves, it is usually only after having used a pronoun in the gender binary for some of their lives. This strict linguistic gender classification system inscribes an ideology of gender through language at the semiotic level (Hodge, 1988: 98). The system is replicated often in how we refer to ourselves and each other, and is absorbed into our consciousness at an early age.
Combining semiotics with gender theory in this way, we can deconstruct the linguistically created gender. We uncover what Judith Butler calls a performative phallocentric language. The performativity of language means positioning language as constructing identity and personhood in addition to communication (Butler, 1990: 26). This allows ideology which is implicitly in charge of the dominant language through their grasp on society the ability to control not only our communication but also our consciousness. Ideology uses language to ensure a false consciousness to render power over others, making us subscribe to the stereotypes of the gender binary by contributing to a lack of language to describe or signify anything else.
Barbara Kruger’s art seeks to examine and undermine the stereotypes that represent power crafted by the sign-signifier relationship to highlight stereotypes that exist within our dominant western ideology of masculine consumption (Kruger, 1984). Many see Kruger as a “guerrilla semiologist,” a term coined by Umberto Eco, who said that those who want to make change must control communication and the only way to do so is through guerrilla methods (Eco, 1986). Kruger does this by using the form and language of advertisements, but co-opts language for activist purposes rather than economic ones. The text is bright, large catchy phrases that uncover the subversive stereotypes of women. The images that she uses have often been used in magazine advertisements, making them semiotically related to economics, but her text gives it a very different symbolic relationship. Through these messages she brings power relationships to the forefront of public discourse (Maric, 2014).
One of Kruger’s pieces that highlights these methods is “Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground).” This piece is inherently political, as it was created for the Women’s March on Washington in 1989 to protest anti-choice laws (Caldwell, 2016). The phrase “your body is a battleground” became a rallying cry for the pro-choice movement and the phrase specifically highlights the ways in which women’s bodies have been used by males. Additionally, she uses the word “battleground,” with its militaristic masculine connotations. This highlights the dichotomy between militaristic male gaze and feminine bodies. In this way, Kruger engages in a conversation with an audience to help them realize the way in which men view and interact with the bodies of others. Rather than a stereotypical signifier to represent women’s bodies—for example using “delicate” or “beautiful”—she uses an atypical word to help us realize the inadequacies of current semiotic language and how it hides the destruction of the feminine body. Furthermore, the use of the direct pronoun “you” engages the audience in a very personal sense of dialogue with Kruger. This, combined with the fact that the piece was created for a very public political event, allows us to see her art as a public dialogue, trying to bring issues to the forefront that are otherwise hidden in semiotic relationships.
Fighting Metaphor: Sophia Wallace
Metaphors add complexity to language viewed simply as signs. They play an important role in subverting the feminine, taking the semiotic relationship of language and complicating it with another layer of analysis. Because of the nature of metaphors, we have to unpack sign-signifier relationships twice. First, to understand the word and what it means and second to understand what the word is being mapped to in the creation of its metaphorical representation. As such, there is more room for miscommunication and misrepresentation as people have to do more work to unpack these representations. Additionally, the way in which we link two concepts together demonstrates underlying assumptions and stereotypes that society has for both of these concepts. One such usage of metaphors for the subversion of women is how we talk about reproductive systems. We describe them as mysterious organs. When we create metaphors for female reproduction, we craft them to be whatever we wish. It is an opening, a container, expanding and contracting at all moments. It can be “protected or exposed, inviting or introverted” (Angier, 1999: 52). The metaphors that we chose to use make certain comparisons which may not be wholly correct. In the metaphors used for the feminine body, our language shows a sense of mystery around the reproductive system, making talking about it even more taboo. Not only is talking openly about the female reproductive system unusual, but the words used to describe it—for example a “flower”—connect the system itself with a sense of mystery, making the entire body shrouded and hidden from public discourse.
The usage of metaphors for women have another societal role when viewed through the lense of rhetoric. Aristotle saw metaphors as important to making an argument because of their power in connecting concepts otherwise unrelated. He asserted that the three most important aspects of metaphor if used as rhetoric are that it is pleasing, lucid, and strange. The one that is the most relevant to how we use metaphors with respect to gender is their “strangeness.” Aristotle argued that metaphors have to be strange because they connect one part of language to another which are not usually connected. He wrote: “Men feel toward language as they feel toward strangers [xenous] and fellow citizens, and we must introduce an element of strangeness into our diction because people marvel at what is far away, and to marvel is pleasant.” (Moran, 1996: 385-398). Here, Aristotle talks of the power of metaphors as a way of marveling at otherwise uncommon objects, but he also shows how these metaphors are connected to the strangeness between people who are different than the “norm.” Therefore, the use of metaphors for women categorize them as “strange” and different than the “norm.” Vico also writes of metaphors used as rhetorical devices. He argues that a metaphor brings two otherwise unrelated concepts together through a linkage and it is that linkage that brings to light a third concept that is a hidden assumption (Schaeffer, 1981). This assumption demonstrates a stereotype that society holds in the original object. For women, this stereotype is a mysterious strangeness unknowable to man.
Sophia Wallace’s work, however, sheds light on the female body, giving a voice to what is often considered taboo. She seeks to explore the hypocrisy between the fact that the feminine body is overly sexualized but modern society knows very little about its anatomy, especially as it relates to pleasure. Wallace gives imagery and language to the taboo and in doing so starts a conversation about otherwise hidden ideas. Often times she uses phrases that are used in American right-wing politics but positions them in the feminine; for example “Don’t tread on my clit,” thereby bringing together two concepts otherwise unrelated, providing a thought provoking linkage and creating an unexpected metaphor.
The phrases that Sophia Wallace uses relate the misunderstandings of women’s bodies to a misunderstanding of fundamental core beliefs of society—such as “the world is flat.” In this way she is able to highlight the fact that we as a society have been ignorant in understanding women’s bodies, which should be considered as absurd as if we all thought the world was flat. Wallace tries to position the female body as discursively similar to male bodies. She rewrites metaphors to help us better understand reproductive systems, deshrouding them from mystification. She creates linkages that map the female body to the seen and knowable. In this way her work subverts metaphors that the dominant ideology has created and in the process making women themselves more visible.
Fighting Narrative: Jenny Holzer
When the semiotic and metaphorical are put together en masse, they present a larger narrative of the core values and beliefs of a dominant ideology. Often times these narratives are stories that set and force a status quo (Hodge, 1988). For example, for women, these are often narratives of dependence crafted from collective knowledge of society’s mythological canon. The Western, Christian story of the start of life told through Adam and Even demonstrates a female dependence on men. The Bible purports that women were crafted from the rib of Adam. There’s a similar narrative in the Greek gods; it was said that Athena came from the skull of Zeus. These narratives perpetuate the idea that men are the default and women are created from them; always a part of them that has derived from man. Without men, these myths argue, women would not exist. However, as Natalie Angier writes in Woman, “we don’t need Adam’s rib, we didn’t use Adam’s rib; our bones calcified and our pelvises hardened entirely without male assistance” (1999: 43-44). These stories of women coming from men, craft a feigned dependence which finds its way outside of the stories and into our public consciousness, creating narratives of caricatures of men who represent Adam and women who represent Eve. In these stories, Eve relies on Adam for not his rib, but rather for economic, material, emotional, and intellectual needs. These stories and the ways in which we talk about them have perpetuated gender delineation in our society and deepened inequalities.
The powerful have created a set of norms and standards as part of the linguistic paradigm which, when not followed, produce a sense of inadequacy in the speaker (Hodge, 1988). Similar to what Gramsci would call a cultural hegemony, these one dimensional narratives create a kind of linguistic hegemony which make some stories unheard (Lears, 1985). Those who control dominant narratives also control what is presented as social truth. The success of this hegemony hinges on a non-coercive implementation. As postcolonialist theorist Spivak writes, the fact that ideology is tied to language and discourse makes it such that certain speakers and ways of speaking are considered more valid than others. In order to make themselves heard, those most marginalized have to perform the speech of the “ruling class” to pander to their ideology and, in this way, ensure that they are heard. Because often times they cannot do this, they cannot speak (Spivak, 1987). This ensures that the dominant ideology continues to hold its power by silencing the stories of those that would revolt against them. In the system we are examining—that is an American patriarchal one—those marginalized are often non-white women.
Jenny Holzer is an American artist who works on art that focuses on the delivery of words and ideas in a public space to combat dominant narratives. She created what she calls “truisms” in the 1970s which are plays on commonly held beliefs in society. She tries to help society realize the problems in how we view and interact with one another. Her work is put up in public spaces in cities to engage a large audience in a conversation about what they stand for. She explicitly tries to provoke both an internal realization of these “truisms” as well as a larger conversational debate.
Many of Holzer’s “truisms” highlight an narrative that is not explicitly stated but underlies much of how society functions. For example “sex differences are here to stay” from her first piece of “truisms” make us confront the fact that our society sees and acts on sex differences and is doing little to change this fact. She brings to the forefront many societal facts that are not talked about but are inherent in our consumerism and relationships to one another. In this way she uses language to discuss narratives that already exist in our society but are not talked about openly. To her audience, she encourages an open dialogue about the ways in which not only our narratives are overly consumerist and masculine but how western ideology influences these relationships as well. Since our dominant narratives control societal truth, Holzer’s “truisms” give us a different truth and, therefore, a different set of dominant narratives.
Conclusion
The dominant ideology controls our language on three different levels: the semiotic, the metaphorical, and the narrative. Through all of these methods of power, the Other, in this case the feminine, are hidden from public discourse and placed on the margins of society. This allows men to control power and since language is a large part of our everyday lives, we are often impervious to our own subversion. However, feminist artists attack the linguistic basis of phallocentric ideology at all three of these levels, using text in their work to engage the audience in a conversation about the otherwise shrouded female subject. In bringing these topics to the forefront linguistically through their work, Barbara Kruger, Sophia Wallace, and Jenny Holzer also bring to the forefront the marginalization of women and work to make male ideology less subversive. In this way, they use words in their art to lessen the male grasp on society and make the world a more equitable place for all genders.
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