This article reads Kim de l'Horizon's award-winning novel Blutbuch (2022) as a contribution to th... more This article reads Kim de l'Horizon's award-winning novel Blutbuch (2022) as a contribution to the epistemology of gender. Amid philosophical debates about internality and externality in the construction of gender, about the feasibility of gender identity as a coherent concept, about gender feels and gender as process, de l'Horizon's novel offers something else: it shows the foolishness of attempting an etiology of gender and the compulsion to attempt one anyway. Instead of setting the ultimate knowability of gender aside, the typical move of today's gender theory, Blutbuch dwells within this impasse. In the novel, I argue, gender appears simultaneously as an empty signifier and an essential aspect of the self. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonica... more Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonical literature and philosophy, Sophie Salvo uncovers the prehistories of the inextricability of gender and language. Taking German discourses on language as her focus, she argues that we are not the inventors but, rather, the inheritors and adaptors of the notion of gender and language’s interrelation. Particularly during the long nineteenth century, ideas about sexual differences shaped how language was understood, classified, and analyzed. As Salvo explains, philosophers asserted the patriarchal origins of language, linguists investigated “women’s languages” and grammatical gender, and literary Modernists imagined “feminine” sign systems, and in doing so they not only deemed sex a necessary category of language but also produced a plethora of gendered tropes and fictions, which they used both to support their claims and delimit their disciplines.
Articulating Difference charts new territory, revealing how gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While Salvo focuses on how male scholars aligned language study with masculinity, she also uncovers how women responded by highlighting the contributions of understudied nineteenth-century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities.
J.J. Bachofen characterizes his 1861 Das Mutterrecht as a feat of historiography. He has purged h... more J.J. Bachofen characterizes his 1861 Das Mutterrecht as a feat of historiography. He has purged his analysis of anything that is not an “objective” depiction of the past: in other words, of anything fictional. But according to Bachofen’s own account, fiction is also what instigates history, what divides the historical from the prehistorical. Only with the advent of “father right,” and its world of invented relations, does the kind of analysis that Bachofen produces become conceivable. My article probes this tension, arguing that we should read Das Mutterrecht as a text concerned not only with the distribution of power between the sexes, or the trajectory of human culture, but also with the impossibility of absolute knowledge under patriarchy. Bachofen depicts the epistemology of patriarchy as precarious and ungrounded. In this way, I argue, he complicates the current understanding of nineteenth-century history as a discipline of inviolable masculine authority.
One of the founders of the nineteenth-century discipline of Sprachwissenschaft, or language scien... more One of the founders of the nineteenth-century discipline of Sprachwissenschaft, or language science, Grimm studies grammatical gender in order to understand the historical development of Germanic languages such as Gothic and Old High German. Yet he also, along the way, affirms gender as the necessary expression of sexual difference in language. Gender is “eine, aber im frühsten zustande der sprache schon vorgegangene anwendung oder übertragung des natürlichen auf alle und jede nomina” (317). By insisting not only on an original connection between grammatical gender and biological sex, but also that this connection is fundamentally intelligible to the modern speaker, Grimm exemplifies an approach to grammatical gender that emerges in the late eighteenth century. Whereas Enlightenment grammarians considered gender to be a capricious structure with little semantic value, scholars of language from the 1770s onwards took gender to be a meaningful—and legible—category. In the century that followed, grammatical gender became a prized structure because it could pro- vide insight into the culturally-specific mindset of its creators. The fact that nouns have different genders in different languages, it was believed, revealed the uniqueness of each culture’s worldview. That an era so invested in the idea of linguistic relativity among nations should take recourse to this notion to explain grammatical gender is perhaps not surprising. What is less well known—and what this article will investigate—is how texts on grammatical gender also used this structure to construct fantasies of masculinity and femininity, turning gender into a proxy for debating the centrality of sexual difference to human identity. Indeed, nineteenth-century theories of grammatical gender have much to tell us about how that period understood the complicated nexus of sex, language, and the activity of being human.
The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 2019
Jenny Erpenbeck's 2015 Gehen, ging, gegangen has largely been received as a novel meant to educat... more Jenny Erpenbeck's 2015 Gehen, ging, gegangen has largely been received as a novel meant to educate the German public about the current "refugee crisis" in Europe. This article argues that Erpenbeck's text has a more complicated relationship to its own didactic potential. By situating Gehen, ging, gegangen within the history of didactic narrative as a genre, the article demonstrates how Erpenbeck's novel borrows from typical didactic conventions, yet also questions the ability of literature to facilitate the political education of its readers.
This article reads Kim de l'Horizon's award-winning novel Blutbuch (2022) as a contribution to th... more This article reads Kim de l'Horizon's award-winning novel Blutbuch (2022) as a contribution to the epistemology of gender. Amid philosophical debates about internality and externality in the construction of gender, about the feasibility of gender identity as a coherent concept, about gender feels and gender as process, de l'Horizon's novel offers something else: it shows the foolishness of attempting an etiology of gender and the compulsion to attempt one anyway. Instead of setting the ultimate knowability of gender aside, the typical move of today's gender theory, Blutbuch dwells within this impasse. In the novel, I argue, gender appears simultaneously as an empty signifier and an essential aspect of the self. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonica... more Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonical literature and philosophy, Sophie Salvo uncovers the prehistories of the inextricability of gender and language. Taking German discourses on language as her focus, she argues that we are not the inventors but, rather, the inheritors and adaptors of the notion of gender and language’s interrelation. Particularly during the long nineteenth century, ideas about sexual differences shaped how language was understood, classified, and analyzed. As Salvo explains, philosophers asserted the patriarchal origins of language, linguists investigated “women’s languages” and grammatical gender, and literary Modernists imagined “feminine” sign systems, and in doing so they not only deemed sex a necessary category of language but also produced a plethora of gendered tropes and fictions, which they used both to support their claims and delimit their disciplines.
Articulating Difference charts new territory, revealing how gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While Salvo focuses on how male scholars aligned language study with masculinity, she also uncovers how women responded by highlighting the contributions of understudied nineteenth-century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities.
J.J. Bachofen characterizes his 1861 Das Mutterrecht as a feat of historiography. He has purged h... more J.J. Bachofen characterizes his 1861 Das Mutterrecht as a feat of historiography. He has purged his analysis of anything that is not an “objective” depiction of the past: in other words, of anything fictional. But according to Bachofen’s own account, fiction is also what instigates history, what divides the historical from the prehistorical. Only with the advent of “father right,” and its world of invented relations, does the kind of analysis that Bachofen produces become conceivable. My article probes this tension, arguing that we should read Das Mutterrecht as a text concerned not only with the distribution of power between the sexes, or the trajectory of human culture, but also with the impossibility of absolute knowledge under patriarchy. Bachofen depicts the epistemology of patriarchy as precarious and ungrounded. In this way, I argue, he complicates the current understanding of nineteenth-century history as a discipline of inviolable masculine authority.
One of the founders of the nineteenth-century discipline of Sprachwissenschaft, or language scien... more One of the founders of the nineteenth-century discipline of Sprachwissenschaft, or language science, Grimm studies grammatical gender in order to understand the historical development of Germanic languages such as Gothic and Old High German. Yet he also, along the way, affirms gender as the necessary expression of sexual difference in language. Gender is “eine, aber im frühsten zustande der sprache schon vorgegangene anwendung oder übertragung des natürlichen auf alle und jede nomina” (317). By insisting not only on an original connection between grammatical gender and biological sex, but also that this connection is fundamentally intelligible to the modern speaker, Grimm exemplifies an approach to grammatical gender that emerges in the late eighteenth century. Whereas Enlightenment grammarians considered gender to be a capricious structure with little semantic value, scholars of language from the 1770s onwards took gender to be a meaningful—and legible—category. In the century that followed, grammatical gender became a prized structure because it could pro- vide insight into the culturally-specific mindset of its creators. The fact that nouns have different genders in different languages, it was believed, revealed the uniqueness of each culture’s worldview. That an era so invested in the idea of linguistic relativity among nations should take recourse to this notion to explain grammatical gender is perhaps not surprising. What is less well known—and what this article will investigate—is how texts on grammatical gender also used this structure to construct fantasies of masculinity and femininity, turning gender into a proxy for debating the centrality of sexual difference to human identity. Indeed, nineteenth-century theories of grammatical gender have much to tell us about how that period understood the complicated nexus of sex, language, and the activity of being human.
The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 2019
Jenny Erpenbeck's 2015 Gehen, ging, gegangen has largely been received as a novel meant to educat... more Jenny Erpenbeck's 2015 Gehen, ging, gegangen has largely been received as a novel meant to educate the German public about the current "refugee crisis" in Europe. This article argues that Erpenbeck's text has a more complicated relationship to its own didactic potential. By situating Gehen, ging, gegangen within the history of didactic narrative as a genre, the article demonstrates how Erpenbeck's novel borrows from typical didactic conventions, yet also questions the ability of literature to facilitate the political education of its readers.
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Papers by Sophie Salvo
Articulating Difference charts new territory, revealing how gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While Salvo focuses on how male scholars aligned language study with masculinity, she also uncovers how women responded by highlighting the contributions of understudied nineteenth-century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities.
Books by Sophie Salvo
Articulating Difference charts new territory, revealing how gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While Salvo focuses on how male scholars aligned language study with masculinity, she also uncovers how women responded by highlighting the contributions of understudied nineteenth-century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities.