Sources and References

• Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press.
• Boncompagni, A. (2021). LGBTQ identities and hermeneutical injustice at the border. HUMANA.MENTE Journal of Philosophical Studies, 14(39), 151–174.
• Cameron, D. (2024). Language, Sexism and Misogyny. Routledge. (Chapters 5, “Making Changes: Can We Decontaminate Sexist Language?” and “Default Male: Sexism and Grammar.”)
• Collins, P. H. (1990). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Unwin Hyman.
• Dembroff, R., & Wodak, D. (2018). He/She/They/Ze. Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 5.
• Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
• Frye, M. (1983). Sexism. In The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (pp. 17–40). Crossing Press.
• Hernandez, J. (forthcoming). Gender affirmation and loving attention.
• Ichikawa, J. J. (2020). Presupposition and consent. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 6(4).
• Kapusta, S. J. (2016). Misgendering and its moral contestability. Hypatia, 31(3), 512–519.
• Kenyon, M. (2025). Do you like that? Demonstratives and unclarity in sexual communication. Analysis.
• Kitzinger, C., & Frith, H. (1999). Just say no? The use of conversation analysis in developing a feminist perspective on sexual refusal. Discourse & Society, 10(3), 293–316.
• Kukla, Q. R. (2018). That’s what she said: The language of sexual negotiation. Ethics, 129(1), 70–97.
• Langton, R. (1993). Speech acts and unspeakable acts. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 22(4), 305–330.
• MacKinnon, C. (1987). Feminism Unmodified. Harvard University Press.
• McKinney, R. A. (2016). Extracted speech. Social Theory and Practice, 42(2), 258–284.
• Medina, J. (2012). Hermeneutical injustice and polyphonic contextualism: Social silences and shared hermeneutical responsibilities. Social Epistemology, 26(2), 201–220.
• Romdenh-Romluc, K. (2016). Hermeneutical injustice: Blood-sports and the English Defence League. Social Epistemology, 30(5–6), 592–610.
• Rosola, M. (2024). Linguistic hermeneutical injustice. Social Epistemology, 39(4).
• Saul, J. (2006). Pornography, speech acts and context. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 106, 229–248.
• Sullivan-Clarke, A. (2020). Relations and how decolonial allies acknowledge land. APA Newsletter on Native American and Indigenous Philosophy, 20(1), 12–16.

Chapter 1: Language, Sexism, and Feminist Philosophy of Language

1.1 What Is Feminist Philosophy of Language?

Feminist philosophy of language (女性主义语言哲学) is a subfield that investigates the ways language structures, reflects, and perpetuates gendered power relations. Unlike traditional philosophy of language, which has often treated linguistic meaning, reference, and speech acts as politically neutral phenomena, feminist philosophers of language insist that language is saturated with social power. The questions they ask are not merely semantic but deeply normative: How does language subordinate? How does it silence? How does it render certain experiences unintelligible?

The field emerged in a recognizable form in the 1990s, though its roots extend to second-wave feminist activism of the 1970s and 1980s, when scholars and activists challenged the generic masculine (“he,” “mankind”), sexist slurs, and the asymmetries embedded in vocabulary (e.g., “master”/“mistress,” “bachelor”/“spinster”). What distinguishes the philosophical turn is the systematic deployment of tools from speech act theory, pragmatics, social epistemology, and metaphysics to diagnose and remedy linguistic injustices.

Jennifer Saul, the instructor of this course and one of the founders of the field, has contributed centrally to debates about pornography, speech acts, and deceptive speech. Her recent research extends to racist and conspiracist speech, illustrating how feminist philosophy of language increasingly intersects with critical race theory, trans philosophy, Indigenous philosophy, and decolonial thought.

1.2 Cameron on Sexist Language and the Possibility of Change

Deborah Cameron’s Language, Sexism and Misogyny provides a comprehensive survey of how sexist attitudes are encoded in and perpetuated through language. Chapter 5, “Making Changes: Can We Decontaminate Sexist Language?”, examines the history and prospects of feminist language reform.

The Persistence of Sexism in Language

Cameron identifies multiple levels at which sexism operates linguistically:

• Lexical asymmetry (词汇不对称): English contains systematic vocabulary gaps and asymmetries that reflect patriarchal social structures. Terms for women often undergo semantic derogation (语义贬化), whereby originally neutral female terms acquire pejorative or sexual connotations over time (e.g., “hussy” from “housewife,” “mistress” from the female counterpart of “master”).
• Grammatical sexism (语法性别歧视): The use of “he” as a supposedly gender-neutral pronoun and “man” as a term for the human species renders women linguistically invisible.
• Discursive sexism (话语性别歧视): Broader patterns of discourse—who speaks, who is listened to, whose speech is taken seriously—reflect and reinforce gendered hierarchies.

Can Language Be Reformed?

Cameron addresses the question pragmatically. Feminist language reforms (such as the adoption of “Ms.,” gender-neutral job titles, and singular “they”) have achieved partial success, but Cameron cautions against naive optimism. Language change is neither purely top-down nor purely organic; it occurs at the intersection of institutional mandate, community uptake, and shifting social norms.

1.3 The Scope of the Course

The four main topics of the course map onto four central mechanisms by which language and gender interact:

1. Hermeneutical injustice (诠释不正义): How gaps in shared interpretive resources prevent marginalized people from understanding and communicating their own experiences.
2. Gender marking and gender neutrality (性别标记与性别中立): How grammatical and lexical gender systems encode and enforce binary gender norms.
3. Speech acts and power (言语行为与权力): How language not only describes but constitutes relations of subordination and silencing.
4. Sexual communication (性沟通): How the pragmatics of consent, refusal, invitation, and desire are shaped by gendered power.

Chapter 2: Hermeneutical Injustice — Theory

2.1 Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice

Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007) introduced a now-canonical taxonomy of wrongs done to persons specifically in their capacity as knowers (认知者). Fricker identifies a distinctively epistemic (认识论的) genus of injustice, arguing that some of the most fundamental wrongs we suffer are wrongs to our status as rational agents capable of producing and sharing knowledge.

Two Species of Epistemic Injustice

The Mechanics of Hermeneutical Injustice

Fricker’s paradigm case is sexual harassment (性骚扰) before the term existed. Women in the 1960s experienced unwanted sexual attention in workplaces but lacked the concept to name, understand, and protest what was happening to them. The absence of the concept was not accidental; it reflected women’s exclusion from the institutions (law, media, academia) where collective interpretive resources are forged.

Hermeneutical injustice has a characteristic structure:

1. Hermeneutical marginalization (诠释边缘化): The subject belongs to a group that participates unequally in the practices through which social meanings are generated. This is the background condition.
2. Hermeneutical gap (诠释空白): There is a lacuna in the collective interpretive resources at the point where the subject needs them.
3. Disadvantage: The gap renders the subject unable to make their experience intelligible to themselves and to others, thereby preventing them from protesting or seeking redress.

The Role of Identity Power

Fricker’s analysis centers on identity power (身份权力)—a socially situated capacity to control others’ actions by activating identity prejudices. Identity power operates through stereotypes (刻板印象) that systematically track social identity and generate either a credibility excess (for the privileged) or a credibility deficit (for the marginalized). In the hermeneutical case, identity power determines who gets to participate in the creation of the shared pool of meanings and concepts.

Epistemic Virtues as Remedy

Fricker’s proposed remedy is the cultivation of epistemic virtues (认识美德)—reliable dispositions to counteract the influence of identity prejudice on one’s judgments of credibility. The virtuous hearer is alert to the possibility that their credibility assessments may be distorted by prejudice and actively corrects for this distortion. For hermeneutical injustice, the remedy is more diffuse: it requires the creation of institutions and practices that include marginalized voices in the production of meaning.

2.2 Medina’s Polyphonic Contextualism

José Medina’s “Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism: Social Silences and Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities” (2012) offers a sympathetic but substantial revision of Fricker’s framework.

The Critique of Fricker

Medina agrees with Fricker’s context-sensitive approach but argues that it needs to be pluralized and rendered relational in more complex ways. His main objections:

1. Monolithic picture of the hermeneutical landscape: Fricker sometimes writes as if there is a single set of collective interpretive resources that a society either has or lacks. Medina insists that any given social context contains multiple, overlapping interpretive communities (诠释共同体) with distinct expressive practices. The concept of sexual harassment, for example, may have been absent from the dominant culture but present in embryonic form in feminist consciousness-raising groups.

2. Oversimplified victim/perpetrator dynamics: Fricker’s account can suggest a sharp divide between those who suffer hermeneutical injustice (the marginalized) and those who do not (the privileged). Medina argues that the picture is more complex: privileged subjects can also be hermeneutically disadvantaged—not in the same way, but insofar as their privileged position generates its own forms of ignorance.

Polyphonic Contextualism

Medina develops this view through an examination of white ignorance (白人无知)—the hermeneutical inability of privileged white subjects to recognize and make sense of their racial identities, experiences, and social contexts. White ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge but an actively maintained failure to understand, sustained by the very interpretive resources that serve white supremacy.

Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities

Medina’s most important contribution is his insistence that hermeneutical responsibilities are interactive (互动的) and relational (关系性的). Whether individuals and groups live up to their hermeneutical responsibilities cannot be determined in isolation; it must be assessed by considering the forms of mutual positionality, responsivity, and reciprocity they display toward one another. The privileged bear a special responsibility to cultivate what Medina calls epistemic friction (认识论摩擦)—the productive discomfort that arises when one’s taken-for-granted interpretive frameworks are challenged by alternative perspectives.

Chapter 3: Hermeneutical Injustice — Applications

3.1 Romdenh-Romluc: Blood Sports and the English Defence League

Komarine Romdenh-Romluc’s “Hermeneutical Injustice: Blood-sports and the English Defence League” (2016) tests the limits of Fricker’s framework by asking a provocative question: can members of extremist groups be victims of hermeneutical injustice?

The Challenge

The English Defence League (EDL) is a far-right organization that gained national visibility in the UK in the early 2010s through protests against what it perceived as the “Islamification” of England. Romdenh-Romluc considers whether the failure of mainstream society to understand or engage with the EDL’s worldview constitutes hermeneutical injustice.

Internal Tensions in Fricker’s Account

Romdenh-Romluc argues that Fricker’s account relies on two intuitions about the source of hermeneutical injustice that are in tension:

1. The structural intuition: Hermeneutical injustice arises from unequal participation in meaning-making practices. By this criterion, any group that is excluded from contributing to collective interpretive resources could be a victim.
2. The moral intuition: Hermeneutical injustice is a wrong—a form of injustice. But it seems counterintuitive to say that society wrongs the EDL by failing to develop interpretive resources that would make extremist ideology more intelligible.

Romdenh-Romluc contends that these intuitions cannot be made consistent within Fricker’s framework as it stands, making the account simultaneously too restrictive (excluding genuine cases) and too permissive (potentially including cases where dominant groups claim hermeneutical victimhood).

Significance for the Field

This paper illustrates a recurring methodological challenge in social epistemology: how to develop a framework capacious enough to capture genuine injustice without licensing spurious claims of epistemic victimhood by dominant groups.

3.2 Boncompagni: LGBTQ Identities and Hermeneutical Injustice at the Border

Anna Boncompagni’s “LGBTQ Identities and Hermeneutical Injustice at the Border” (2021) applies Fricker’s framework to a concrete institutional setting: the asylum process.

Epistemic Injustice in the Asylum Process

Asylum seekers are structurally positioned as subjects whose testimony (证词) must be assessed for credibility by state officials. Boncompagni argues that this setting is saturated with epistemic injustice:

• Testimonial injustice: Asylum seekers are routinely disbelieved or discounted because of prejudices linked to their nationality, race, religion, or sexuality.
• Hermeneutical injustice: LGBTQ asylum seekers face a distinctive form of hermeneutical injustice because the categories through which they must articulate their persecution may not map onto the interpretive frameworks available to adjudicators.

The Double Bind of LGBTQ Asylum Claims

LGBTQ asylum seekers often face a double bind (双重困境):

1. They must narrate their persecution in terms legible to Western legal frameworks, which may require adopting identity categories (“gay,” “lesbian,” “transgender”) that do not correspond to how they understand their own experiences.
2. If their narratives do not conform to expected scripts of LGBTQ identity—if they do not perform their identity in ways adjudicators recognize—their claims may be dismissed as lacking credibility.

Hinge Epistemology and Hermeneutical Justice

Boncompagni draws on hinge epistemology (枢纽认识论)—the Wittgensteinian idea that certain beliefs function as “hinges” around which other beliefs turn—to explore how adjudicators’ background assumptions about sexuality and gender function as unexamined presuppositions that shape the evaluation of asylum claims. Practices of hermeneutical justice would require making these hinge commitments explicit and subject to critical scrutiny.

Chapter 4: Sexism in Language — Gender Marking

4.1 Frye on Sexism and Sex-Marking

Marilyn Frye’s essay “Sexism” (1983, from The Politics of Reality) offers one of the earliest and most influential philosophical analyses of how language participates in the construction and maintenance of sexist social structures.

Defining Sexism

Sex-Marking in Language

Frye observes that English, like most languages, requires pervasive sex-marking. One cannot refer to an individual with a pronoun without indicating their sex. One cannot address a letter without choosing between “Mr.” and “Ms./Mrs./Miss.” One cannot narrate an event involving other people without continuously marking the sex of every person mentioned.

Frye’s crucial philosophical move is to connect this linguistic fact to a political analysis: the relentless demand that sex be marked in language is not a neutral feature of grammar but a mechanism for maintaining the sex/gender system (性/性别体系)—the social structure that assigns roles, expectations, and power differentially on the basis of sex.

The Logic of Sex-Marking

Frye argues that sex-marking is relevant only in contexts where sex differences matter—and that the sheer ubiquity of sex-marking reveals that our society treats sex as always relevant, even when it manifestly is not. To announce one’s sex in every linguistic exchange is to participate, however unwittingly, in the system that makes sex the basis for differential treatment.

4.2 Cameron on Default Male

Cameron’s chapter “Default Male: Sexism and Grammar” extends the analysis of sex-marking by examining the specific phenomenon of the generic masculine (通称阳性).

The Generic “He” and “Man”

For centuries, English grammarians maintained that “he” and “man” could function as gender-neutral terms referring to any human being. Feminist linguists have challenged this on both normative and empirical grounds:

• Normative objection: Using masculine terms as generic erases women from linguistic representation, treating the male as the default human and the female as the deviation.
• Empirical objection: Psycholinguistic research consistently shows that “he” and “man,” even in supposedly generic uses, activate mental images of males. The generic masculine is not psychologically neutral.

The Default Male as Cognitive Framework

Cameron argues that the generic masculine is not merely a grammatical convention but an instance of a broader cognitive pattern: androcentrism (男性中心主义), the treatment of the male as the unmarked, default human being and the female as the marked, specialized case. This pattern extends beyond pronouns to:

• Naming practices: Occupational terms that were historically unmarked (e.g., “doctor,” “professor”) are implicitly coded as male, requiring modification for women (“female doctor,” “woman professor”).
• Discourse patterns: In media, politics, and everyday conversation, men’s experiences and perspectives are presented as universal while women’s are presented as particular or exceptional.

Chapter 5: Misgendering and Pronouns

5.1 Kapusta on Misgendering

Stephanie Julia Kapusta’s “Misgendering and Its Moral Contestability” (2016) brings the philosophical analysis of gendered language into direct engagement with trans experience.

What Is Misgendering?

The Harms of Misgendering

Kapusta identifies three categories of harm:

1. Diminishment of self-respect (自尊受损): Being persistently referred to by incorrect gender terms undermines a transgender person’s sense of being recognized as who they are.
2. Limitation of discursive resources (话语资源受限): When the dominant deployments of gender terms exclude or marginalize transgender persons, those persons are deprived of the linguistic resources needed to articulate and defend their own gender identity.
3. Microaggressive psychological harm (微攻击心理伤害): Each instance of misgendering may seem minor in isolation, but the cumulative effect of repeated misgendering constitutes a pattern of microaggression (微攻击) with serious psychological consequences.

Moral Contestability

Kapusta’s key philosophical contribution is the concept of moral contestability (道德可争议性): the idea that deployments of gender terms are not merely descriptive but normative, and can therefore be challenged on ethical and political grounds. She examines two prominent feminist characterizations of “woman” and argues that both are defective from a trans-inclusive perspective:

• One excludes at least some transgender women by tying womanhood too closely to biological sex.
• The other implicitly creates hierarchies among women, treating cisgender women as paradigmatic and transgender women as marginal cases.

5.2 Dembroff and Wodak on Gendered Pronouns

Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak’s “He/She/They/Ze” (2018) pushes the analysis of gendered language from a moderate position to a radical one.

The Moderate Claim

The moderate claim is that we have a negative duty (消极义务) not to use binary gender-specific pronouns (“he” or “she”) to refer to genderqueer (性别酷儿) individuals—those who do not identify within the binary. Dembroff and Wodak defend this through an argument by analogy: deliberately using “he” to refer to a genderqueer person is morally analogous to deliberately using “he” to refer to a transgender woman. Since the latter is widely recognized as a grave moral wrong, the former should be too.

The Radical Claim

The radical claim goes further: we have a negative duty not to use any gender-specific pronouns to refer to anyone, regardless of their gender identity. Dembroff and Wodak offer three arguments:

1. Inegalitarianism and risk (不平等主义与风险): Binary pronoun systems create a default expectation that everyone is either male or female, disadvantaging those who are not. Even well-intentioned use of “he” and “she” carries the risk of misgendering, since one cannot reliably know another’s gender identity from appearance.

2. Invasions of privacy (隐私侵犯): Using gendered pronouns requires either making assumptions about someone’s gender or asking them to disclose it. Both can constitute an invasion of privacy, particularly for closeted or questioning individuals.

3. Reinforcing essentialist ideologies (强化本质主义意识形态): The binary pronoun system presupposes that humanity is exhaustively divided into two gender categories. Continued use of gendered pronouns reinforces this ideology, even when used correctly.

Practical Objections and Responses

Dembroff and Wodak consider and respond to practical objections about adopting gender-neutral pronouns:

• Linguistic confusion: The worry that “they” is confusing as a singular pronoun. Response: singular “they” has centuries of precedent, and any initial confusion dissipates with practice.
• Neologism resistance: The worry that coined pronouns like “ze” are artificial. Response: all language is conventional, and new terms are coined and adopted regularly.

Chapter 6: Gender Affirmation and Linguistic Justice

6.1 Hernandez on Gender Affirmation and Loving Attention

Hernandez’s “Gender Affirmation and Loving Attention” explores the positive dimension of gendered language use—not merely the harms of misgendering, but the goods that correct gendering can achieve.

Beyond Harm Avoidance

Much of the philosophical literature on gendered language focuses on the harms of linguistic mistreatment: misgendering, slurs, exclusion. Hernandez argues that this focus on harm avoidance, while important, is incomplete. Correct gendering is not merely the absence of misgendering; it is a positive act of affirmation (肯定) that contributes to a person’s flourishing.

Loving Attention

Hernandez draws on the tradition of care ethics (关怀伦理学) and phenomenological accounts of attention to argue that gender affirmation through language is a form of ethical recognition. It is not enough to avoid actively misgendering someone; genuine gender affirmation requires the kind of attentive engagement that treats the other person’s gender identity as something to be received with care, not merely tolerated.

Implications for Linguistic Practice

This analysis has practical implications: merely implementing pronoun policies (e.g., asking for and using preferred pronouns) is insufficient if it is done mechanically or grudgingly. Gender-affirming language practice requires a deeper shift in orientation—from compliance to care, from tolerance to recognition.

6.2 Rosola on Linguistic Hermeneutical Injustice

Martina Rosola’s “Linguistic Hermeneutical Injustice” (2024) introduces a new species of hermeneutical injustice that is distinctly linguistic in character, extending Fricker’s framework from conceptual gaps to grammatical structures.

The Problem of Grammatical Gender

Many languages (Italian, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, etc.) have systems of grammatical gender (语法性别) that mark gender on nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and other agreement targets. In such languages, referring to a person requires selecting a grammatical gender—typically masculine or feminine. This creates a structural problem for non-binary (非二元性别) persons: the language itself provides no appropriate grammatical form for referring to them.

Four Types of Discrepancy

Rosola, taking Italian as her primary case study, identifies four circumstances in which a discrepancy arises between a gendered term and its referent:

1. Non-binary individuals: The language has no grammatical gender that corresponds to a non-binary identity.
2. Women and non-binary professionals in traditionally male-dominated fields: Terms for these professions often exist only in masculine form.
3. Generic or unknown individuals: The masculine is used as the default for persons of unknown or unspecified gender.
4. Mixed-gender groups: The masculine plural is used for groups containing members of different genders.

Usage vs. Structural Discrepancies

Linguistic Hermeneutical Injustice

Structural discrepancies constitute a form of hermeneutical injustice because they depend on a gap in collective interpretive resources (the lack of an appropriate grammatical gender) and put non-binary people at an unfair disadvantage in making sense of and communicating their social experiences. The injustice is built into the grammar itself, not merely into how speakers deploy it.

Chapter 7: Speech Acts, Silencing, and Pornography

7.1 Langton: Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts

Rae Langton’s “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts” (1993) is one of the founding texts of feminist philosophy of language. It deploys J. L. Austin’s speech act theory (言语行为理论) to give philosophical precision to Catharine MacKinnon’s claim that pornography subordinates and silences women.

Austin’s Speech Act Theory: A Brief Review

Austin distinguished three dimensions of any utterance:

Pornography as Illocutionary Subordination

MacKinnon’s claim that “pornography is the subordination of women” can be interpreted in two ways:

1. Causal interpretation: Pornography causes harm to women (a perlocutionary claim).
2. Constitutive interpretation: Pornography itself constitutes the subordination of women (an illocutionary claim).

Langton defends the constitutive interpretation. If pornography is a speech act, then it has illocutionary force—and Langton argues that its illocutionary force includes:

• Ranking (排序): Pornography ranks women as inferior.
• Legitimation (合法化): Pornography legitimates discrimination against women.
• Deprivation (剥夺): Pornography deprives women of important powers and rights—including, crucially, the power to refuse.

Illocutionary Silencing

Langton’s most influential contribution is her analysis of illocutionary silencing (言外沉默). A person is illocutionarily silenced when they are unable to perform the speech act they intend to perform. Langton distinguishes this from:

• Locutionary silencing (言内沉默): Being prevented from speaking at all.
• Perlocutionary silencing (言后沉默): Speaking but failing to achieve one’s intended effects.

Illocutionary silencing occurs when a woman says “no” to unwanted sex but her utterance fails to count as a refusal—because pornography has constructed a context in which women’s “no” is systematically reinterpreted as meaning “yes,” or as part of a performance of coyness. The woman speaks, and she means to refuse, but she cannot perform the illocutionary act of refusing because the conditions necessary for that act to succeed (felicity conditions, 适切条件) have been undermined.

Authority and Felicity Conditions

For an illocutionary act to succeed, certain felicity conditions must be met—including, for many acts, the speaker’s authority (权威). Langton argues that pornography undermines women’s authority to perform the illocutionary act of refusal. Just as a private citizen cannot perform the illocutionary act of sentencing someone to prison (because they lack the requisite authority), women in certain contexts cannot perform the illocutionary act of refusing sex (because their authority to refuse has been systematically undermined).

7.2 Saul: Pornography, Speech Acts, and Context

Jennifer Saul’s “Pornography, Speech Acts and Context” (2006) develops a sympathetic but critical response to Langton, arguing that the role of context (语境) poses serious problems for the speech-act approach to pornography.

The Problem of Context

Saul’s central argument: if pornography is a speech act, then it must be an utterance in a context—and speech acts derive their illocutionary force in part from the context in which they are produced. Once we take context seriously, Langton’s defense of MacKinnon becomes significantly less plausible.

The point is not that pornography never subordinates women. Rather, it is that pornography does not always and necessarily subordinate women. The same pornographic content might have the illocutionary force of subordination in one context (e.g., when used by an authority figure to establish workplace norms) but not in another (e.g., when viewed privately by a feminist couple for mutual enjoyment).

Context-Sensitive Speech Acts

Saul observes that the illocutionary force of an utterance is not determined solely by its content but also by features of the context, including:

• Who the speaker is (and their social authority)
• Who the audience is (and their uptake dispositions)
• The institutional setting (and its norms and conventions)
• Background assumptions (shared between speaker and audience)

If we apply this insight consistently, it follows that not all instances of pornography have the same illocutionary force. Some may subordinate; others may not.

Implications for the Feminist Debate

Chapter 8: Speech Acts, Power, and Decolonization

8.1 Sullivan-Clarke: Relations and Decolonial Allies

Andrea Sullivan-Clarke’s “Relations and How Decolonial Allies Acknowledge Land” (2020) applies speech act theory to a contemporary practice: land acknowledgments (土地致谢) at the opening of events, classes, and institutional proceedings.

Land Acknowledgments as Speech Acts

Land acknowledgments are now widespread in Canadian institutional settings. Sullivan-Clarke asks: what kind of speech acts are these? What are they supposed to do? And do they succeed?

Failed Speech Acts

Sullivan-Clarke argues that many land acknowledgments used by non-Indigenous institutions are speech acts that fail (失败的言语行为). If the goal is reconciliation, then the context of these statements must change for them to succeed. Specifically:

• Performative contradiction (述行矛盾): An institution that acknowledges Indigenous land but takes no action to redress dispossession is performing a speech act whose content contradicts its context. The acknowledgment purports to recognize Indigenous sovereignty, but the institution’s ongoing practices deny it.
• Appropriation (挪用): When land acknowledgments become routine formulas recited without understanding or commitment, they risk being appropriated—serving to alleviate settler colonial guilt rather than to advance genuine reconciliation.

Decolonial Allyship

Sullivan-Clarke argues that for land acknowledgments to succeed as speech acts, they must be embedded in ongoing relational practices of decolonial allyship. The felicity conditions for a successful land acknowledgment include not just the utterance itself but the speaker’s and institution’s sustained commitment to the values the acknowledgment expresses.

8.2 McKinney: Extracted Speech

Rachel Ann McKinney’s “Extracted Speech” (2016) introduces a phenomenon that has been largely neglected in the philosophical literature on speech acts: speech that is unjustly extracted from speakers.

Beyond Silencing

Most feminist work on speech acts has focused on silencing—the ways in which power prevents people from speaking or performing intended speech acts. McKinney argues that power can also produce speech: it can coerce, manipulate, or incentivize speakers into performing speech acts that serve the interests of the powerful rather than the speaker’s own interests.

Examples

McKinney discusses several paradigm cases:

1. Coerced confessions (被迫认罪): A suspect subjected to intense interrogation “confesses” to a crime. The confession satisfies the formal requirements of an assertion, but the conditions under which it was produced undermine its status as a genuine speech act.
2. Intimidated “consent” (被胁迫的"同意"): A person “consents” to sex or a medical procedure under conditions of coercion or extreme power asymmetry. The utterance has the surface form of consent but is extracted rather than freely given.
3. Mandatory self-disclosure (强制自我披露): Institutional requirements to disclose identity information (gender, sexuality, disability, immigration status) can extract speech that exposes the speaker to harm.

The Significance of Extraction

McKinney argues that extracted speech has been overlooked because speech act theory has traditionally focused on the speaker’s intentions and the hearer’s uptake, treating the conditions under which speech is produced as background. But just as Langton showed that speech acts can be silenced, McKinney shows that they can be extracted—produced against the speaker’s interests or will. This symmetry deepens our understanding of the relationship between speech and power.

Chapter 9: Sexual Communication — Refusal and Consent

9.1 Kitzinger and Frith: Just Say No?

Celia Kitzinger and Hannah Frith’s “Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal” (1999) brings the empirical methods of conversation analysis (会话分析, CA) to bear on feminist debates about sexual consent and refusal.

The “Just Say No” Paradigm

Date-rape prevention programs frequently advise women to “just say no”—to make their refusal of unwanted sex clear, direct, and unambiguous. The implicit assumption is that sexual assaults often result from miscommunication: women’s refusals are too indirect or ambiguous, and men genuinely fail to understand them.

What Conversation Analysis Shows

Kitzinger and Frith use CA to demonstrate that this assumption is empirically false. CA reveals that refusals are complex conversational actions (复杂会话行为) with a characteristic structure:

• Delays and hesitations: Refusals are typically preceded by pauses, hedges, and delays.
• Prefaces: Refusals often begin with appreciation of the offer (“That sounds nice, but…”).
• Palliatives: Refusals include softening moves that mitigate the face-threat of declining.
• Accounts: Refusals are typically accompanied by reasons or excuses (“I’d love to, but I have to work early”).

These features are not peculiar to sexual contexts; they are the normal, culturally universal way humans refuse any kind of offer or invitation. Competent members of any culture recognize these indirect refusal strategies without difficulty.

The Feminist Implication

Furthermore, the “just say no” advice is counterproductive:

1. It implies that indirect refusals are ambiguous or defective, when in fact they are perfectly clear to competent social actors.
2. It places the burden of preventing assault on women rather than on men.
3. It treats the problem as one of women’s communicative inadequacy rather than of men’s willful refusal to accept “no” in whatever form it takes.

9.2 Kukla: That’s What She Said

Quill R. Kukla’s “That’s What She Said: The Language of Sexual Negotiation” (2018) argues that the philosophical and public discourse on sexual ethics has been distorted by an exclusive focus on consent (同意) and refusal (拒绝), neglecting the full range of speech acts that constitute sexual negotiation.

Three Theses

Kukla defends three main claims:

1. The distortion thesis: Discussions of consent have dominated philosophical and legal discourse around sexual negotiation and distorted our understanding of sexual agency and ethics. The consent/refusal binary captures only a small part of the rich and varied communicative landscape of sexual interaction.

2. The invitation thesis: Of central importance to good-quality sexual negotiation are sexual invitations (性邀请) and gift offers (赠予提议), as well as speech designed to set up safe frameworks and exit conditions. These speech acts have a distinctive normative structure that the consent framework fails to capture.

3. The positive thesis: Sexual communication that goes well does not merely prevent harm; it enables forms of agency, pleasure, and fulfillment that would not otherwise be possible. Good sexual communication is not just about avoiding wrongdoing but about creating conditions for mutual flourishing.

Invitations as Speech Acts

Kukla argues that much sexual communication has the structure of invitations rather than requests-for-consent. Understanding this distinction matters because it changes what we expect from the participants: an invitation creates a context in which declining is easy and comfortable (because no one is obligated to accept an invitation), while a request for consent creates a context in which declining may feel like a refusal of something already expected.

Beyond the Consent Binary

Kukla identifies several speech acts that are central to sexual negotiation but invisible within the consent framework:

• Invitations and gift offers: “Would you like me to…?”
• Framework-setting: “Let’s agree that either of us can stop at any time.”
• Check-ins: “Is this okay?”
• Collaborative narration: Partners jointly constructing the meaning and direction of their encounter.

Chapter 10: Presupposition, Consent, and Desire

10.1 Ichikawa: Presupposition and Consent

Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa’s “Presupposition and Consent” (2020) offers a philosophical critique of the very concept of consent as it functions in sexual ethics, drawing on tools from the philosophy of language—specifically, the theory of presupposition (预设).

The Presupposition of Consent

Ichikawa’s central claim: the language of “consent” carries a conventional presupposition that the action consented to is at someone else’s behest. When we describe someone as “consenting” to X, we presuppose that X is something initiated, proposed, or desired by another party, and that the consenter’s role is to permit or allow it.

The Problem for Sexual Ethics

This presupposition creates a distorted picture of sexual agency:

• When someone acts out of their own desire—choosing independently to engage in sexual activity—it is linguistically odd to describe them as “consenting” to it. Consent language presupposes a structure in which one party proposes and the other permits.
• Conversely, it is also odd to say that someone “did not consent” to something they independently chose to do.

Ichikawa argues that this reveals a deep problem with the central role of “consent” in contemporary sexual ethics: the concept is structurally suited to describe only one kind of sexual agency (the passive, permissive kind) and obscures other kinds (active desire, mutual initiation, collaborative exploration).

What Follows?

Ichikawa does not argue that consent is unimportant or that nonconsensual sex can be morally permissible. Rather, his claim is that consent is poorly suited to serve as the master concept of sexual ethics because its presuppositional structure encodes a particular model of sexual interaction—one in which desire and initiative are asymmetrically distributed—that feminists have good reason to resist.

10.2 Kenyon: Do You Like That?

Madeleine Kenyon’s “Do You Like That? Demonstratives and Unclarity in Sexual Communication” (2025) brings fine-grained tools from the philosophy of language—specifically, the semantics of demonstratives (指示词)—to the analysis of sexual communication.

The Indispensability of Demonstratives

Kenyon argues that demonstratives are indispensable for effective sexual communication. During sexual encounters, participants frequently need to refer to acts, sensations, and body parts without precisely naming them. Demonstratives like “that” (as in “Do you like that?”) allow speakers to refer to ongoing or recent actions without the awkwardness or impossibility of explicit description.

The Built-in Unclarity

However, demonstratives are inherently unclear (不清晰的): their reference depends on context and can be ambiguous or indeterminate. When someone asks “Do you like that?”, it may be unclear exactly what “that” refers to—a specific action, a general situation, an intensity, a location. This unclarity is not a defect of the speaker; it is a structural feature of demonstrative reference.

The Tension

This creates a tension for sexual ethics:

1. Demonstratives are necessary: Without them, sexual communication would be impoverished, stilted, and often impossible. Explicit verbal description of every sexual act is neither practical nor desirable.
2. Demonstratives are unclear: Because of their inherent context-dependence, demonstratives introduce an irreducible element of unclarity into sexual communication.
3. Therefore: Sexual communication can never be fully explicit. There is always a gap between what is said and what is understood, a gap that demonstratives both bridge and widen.

Connection to Broader Themes

Kenyon’s analysis connects to the course’s broader themes in several ways:

• It illustrates how philosophy of language tools (demonstratives, reference, context-dependence) can illuminate questions of feminist ethics.
• It demonstrates the limits of linguistic explicitness—a theme that runs through the course from Fricker’s hermeneutical gaps to Kukla’s communicative richness.
• It shows that the philosophy of sexual communication is not merely a matter of social norms and power dynamics but is shaped by the fundamental semantic properties of language itself.

Concluding Synthesis: Language, Power, and Justice

The readings in this course converge on a set of interconnected theses:

Language is not neutral. Every topic examined—from hermeneutical injustice to pronoun politics, from illocutionary silencing to the presuppositions of consent—reveals that linguistic structures and practices are saturated with power. Language does not merely describe a pre-existing social reality; it actively constitutes, maintains, and sometimes transforms relations of domination and subordination.

Injustice has epistemic and linguistic dimensions. Fricker’s taxonomy of epistemic injustice, extended by Medina, Romdenh-Romluc, Boncompagni, and Rosola, shows that some of the deepest injustices are wrongs to our capacity to make sense of our own experience and to communicate that experience to others. These are not secondary effects of “real” (material, economic, physical) injustice but constitutive dimensions of it.

Speech act theory is a powerful feminist tool. Langton’s pioneering application of Austin to pornography opened a research program that has been extended in multiple directions: Saul’s attention to context, Sullivan-Clarke’s analysis of land acknowledgments, McKinney’s concept of extracted speech, Kukla’s taxonomy of sexual speech acts, and Kenyon’s analysis of demonstratives. Together, these show that the philosophical analysis of what we do with words is directly relevant to understanding and combating gendered oppression.

The consent framework is necessary but insufficient. Kitzinger, Kukla, Ichikawa, and Kenyon collectively argue that sexual ethics requires a richer communicative vocabulary than “consent” and “refusal” alone can provide. Good sexual communication involves invitations, check-ins, collaborative narration, and demonstrative reference—a complex communicative ecology that cannot be reduced to a binary yes/no.

Linguistic justice is an ongoing project. From Cameron’s analysis of language reform to Dembroff and Wodak’s radical proposal for gender-neutral pronouns, from Kapusta’s concept of moral contestability to Rosola’s identification of structural discrepancies in grammatical gender systems, the course reveals that achieving linguistic justice requires both individual virtue and structural change—changes not just in how we use language but in the languages we have.