Burke the Feminist?

Gender Troubles recognizes a distinct problem that the feminist literary movement will always face, the limitations of language. Butler specifically finds an issue in the fact that “the presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which it functions “(6). She notes that the binary system of gender we have is due to a “phallogocentric language” system in which women are essentially impossible to depict due to the dominance of male orientated language (Butler 13).  This perspective honestly made me feel a little guilty for being a man and raised the question whether women are able to escape the influences of male language in their writings.

I found Ann George’s article to be very interesting and the comparison of Kenneth Burke and Helen Keller shed some light into feminism and phallogocentric language. Some critics of Keller’s writings have claimed that since she lacked the sensory abilities to see and hear, some of the experiences she wrote about must have been recounts of what she is told. This made a lot of sense to me, but Keller retorts, “Of course, I am not always on the spot when things happen, nor are you… But that did not prevent me, anymore than it prevented you, from knowing about it” (A New Light 95).  Essentially George is identifying that Helen Keller perceived her world through lenses of sorts, and we all have lenses hers is just more noticeable than ours.  This is where Burke agrees, “much that we take as observations about reality may be but the spinning out of possibilities implicit in our particular terms” (Terministic Screens 46).

The “implicit terms” Burke speaks of appear to be grounded in a phallogocentric system and brings upon the question of how one escapes the system. During the 70’s a new wave in feminist literary criticism emerged from France called ecripture feminine. The basis of this movement is that phallogocentric languages are crushing feminist writings and there must be a break away from this norm. Cixous coined the term and claimed that ecripture feminine was a sort of response to phallogocentric writing, and this disruption was not exclusive to women. She noted that authors like James Joyce strayed away from the male dominated system and thus were creating new points of view. I would have to say that Kenneth Burke was participating in the search for a new perspective not dominated by language also. I wonder what Butler, George and Cixous would say if I called Burke a feminist critic?