Literary and Cultural Studies – Exercise 1 of 3

Cultural studies assumes that our perception of what the world around us means relies to a large part on the language we use (and are taught to use) to describe it. This is one of the concerns of the currently influential ‘woke’ movement and the campaign for the use of gendered language.

The argument that language in fact constructs our world (a position called constructivism) is based on positions in structuralist linguistics and poststructuralist philosophy. Structuralism argues that the relation between a sign and the concept this sign describes is arbitrary; in other words: you can use the sign ‘flower’ to describe the concept flower (i.e., the blossom of a plant), but you could also use the sign ‘Blume’ or ‘fleur’.

Language gains its meaning because a language community agrees on which signs to use to describe the concepts in question. If this is the case, this also means that the signs a language makes available categorize the world and, in this sense, interpret it. Specific signs then come with certain connotations which in turn provoke certain actions.
So, if you describe an item as a flower, you might want to cherish it in your garden or pick it to give to someone you love. If, on the other hand, you categorize the same item as ‘weed’, you might want to pull it out and put it in the compost. It works in a similar fashion with the way one categorizes people into certain groups using language with certain connotations (negative or positive, strong or weak, etc.). This is why inclusive language is considered important to achieve social equality.