PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Reflections on the relationship between body and language play an important role in theoretical discussions and in the day-to-day business of gender research. While in deconstructivist approaches the body and bodily experiences are considered as having always been mediated by language, current activist contexts and phenomenological approaches attribute to the body a special function when it comes to the transformation of the gender order. What these approaches have in common is that they view language and the body as distinct and opposing entities. Taking the experiencing and speaking, lived body as a starting point, our intervention aims to criticize a way of thinking in terms of the body/language paradigm and makes suggestions for a para-doxical way out of this polarization. To this end, we draw on Roland Barthes’s reflections on the materiality and corporeality of (poetic) language, on insights in linguistic pragmatics and on the approach adopted by the US philosopher of language and psychotherapist Eugene T. Gendlin. Finally, in a brief reading of Kim de l’Horizon’s autofictional novel Blutbuch (2022) we demonstrate the productivity of our approach, which develops a new perspective on gender based on these positions.