Article contents
Performative Force, Convention, and Discursive Injustice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Abstract
I explore how gender can shape the pragmatics of speech. In some circumstances, when a woman deploys standard discursive conventions in order to produce a speech act with a specific performative force, her utterance can turn out, in virtue of its uptake, to have a quite different force—a less empowering force—than it would have if performed by a man. When members of a disadvantaged group face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that they are entitled to perform—and in particular when their attempts result in their actually producing a different kind of speech act that further compromises their social position and agency—then they are victims of what I call discursive injustice. I examine three examples of discursive injustice. I contrast my account with Langton and Hornsby's account of illocutionary silencing. I argue that lack of complete control over the performative force of our speech acts is universal, and not a special marker of social disadvantage. However, women and other relatively disempowered speakers are sometimes subject to a distinctive distortion of the path from speaking to uptake, which undercuts their social agency in ways that track and enhance existing social disadvantages.
- Type
- Open Issue Content
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.
Footnotes
This paper is an offshoot of work that I have been doing with Mark Lance over the past eight years, and it owes a great debt to both my formal writing and my informal conversations with him. The paper was originally written for presentation at an invited APA symposium on feminist philosophy of language (Boston, Mass., December 2010), and I am grateful to my co‐panelists, Lynne Tirrell and Mary‐Kate McGowan, whose own papers helped me develop this paper into its final form. Conversations with Cassie Herbert, Jessica Williams, and Eric Winsberg were extremely helpful, as were comments from anonymous reviewers at Hypatia.
References
- 123
- Cited by