The relationship between language and gender in feminist deconstruction theories: the case of grammatical gender

The relation between language and gender has been an object of inquiry for both feminist linguistics and feminist deconstruction theories. In the present paper, I focus on the work of three feminist deconstruction philosophers, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig and Judith Butler, who have theorized language as a means of constructing gendered subjectivity and reproducing the patriarchal symbolic order, with a special emphasis on the role of grammatical gender. I would like to address two questions: (1) Do feminist deconstruction philosophers approach grammatical gender in a way which is compatible to linguistics? (2) How do they contribute to the understanding of the relation between language and gender and more specifically to the understanding of grammatical gender? I argue that, although feminist deconstruction theories contribute to a deeper understanding of the category of gender, they prove to be arbitrary and inadequate from a linguistic perspective