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*Corresponding Author’s Email: alberto.grandi94@gmail.com
Proceedings of the International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality
Vol. 1, Issue. 1, 2024, pp. 1-11
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33422/icgss.v1i1.180
Copyright © 2024 Author(s)
ISSN: 3030-0533 online
Language, Neuter, and Masculinity:
The Influence of the Neuter-Male in the Reiteration
of Social Models, A Philosophical Analysis Starting
with Cavarero, Irigaray, and Butler
Alberto Grandi1
Università degli studi di Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy
Abstract
Gender studies has generated numerous questions around “neutral” forms, such as the concept
of “Self”. The aim of this analysis is to highlight how “neutral” forms are central to the
reiteration of the binary model and the dominance of “man2”. Historically, man is the
archetype, placing his supremacy as part of the natural order of things. Inserted into this model,
many thinkers have considered the male as the transcendental gender, so, elevating the
masculine as universal, a-sexed and decorporealised. In this way, man has convinced himself
that he’s not conditioned by his masculinity and can speak for all humanity, becoming the logos
through which he declines the rest. Man, therefore, has made himself “neutral” – both in the
conceptual sense and in the grammatical structure (particularly of binary languages such as
Italian) – by taking control of language. Through it, he orders and constitutes the world,
developing dichotomies and signifying anatomical bodies. In this research, it is intended to
work on language and the relationship between “neutral” and power, emphasizing how that
relationship is central to the reproduction of the patriarchal model. Through a critical
philosophical reflection, which sees a logical-linguistic and historical-processual
methodological structure, the discourse of the I-neutral will be crossed, pointing out how that
“neutral” is in truth male. The concluding goal will be to, through “fluid” visions, build the
basis for a language that is truly neutral and ready to embrace multiplicity, without relations of
domination; a language really inclusive and not a reiterator of the patriarchal model.
Keywords: masculinity, language, social models, neutral, power relations
1 A graduate in Philosophical Sciences, he is currently a PhD student in Gender Studies at the University of Bari
Aldo Moro. The research project concerns the analysis of masculinity and linguistic performativity in the
context of gender studies, with a dual purpose: on the one hand, philosophical and social analysis, starting from
a pragmatist perspective and deepening the theme of the constitution of people and power relations. On the
other, the aim of developing appropriate communication strategies to contrast discrimination and produce
inclusive environments, in particular in corporate realities.
2 Intersectionally intended as male, white, cisgender, heterosexual, able and middle-class
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1. Introduction
Gender studies has produced numerous questions about the philosophical and social models
that construct and constitute our contemporaneity. In this critical reading, there are also all
those forms defined as “neutral”, which underlie the basis of fundamental concepts of our
thought: such as the Self. In the philosophical field, specifically in a reading of gender studies
from the prospective of the philosophy of language, the following questions are asked: can we
really think of a neutral-universal subject? Are neutral forms and discourse truly devoid of
gendering? Is the elevation of the masculine as the Self-universal really neutral, de-corporeal,
a-sexed, and, therefore, irrelevant to power relations and the constitution of the person? Can
the concept of Nature, central in the gender studies and sex difference themes, be considered a
neutral element of the discourse?
It is precisely on these questions that I would like to begin the analysis, by emphasising how
“neutral” forms, philosophically and grammatically, are central with respect to the reiteration
of the binary model and the domination of the male; here intersectionally understood as white,
heterosexual, cisgender, occidental, middle-class and ableist.
In the occidental civilization, man - in the sense of patriarchal intersectional masculinity -
is the canon, the archetype, the model on which the entire social structure is based; developing
a continuous perpetuated praxis. Male supremacy, in this way, seems to be part of the natural
order of things, in an inevitable biologism that defines power relations and hierarchical roles.
This naturalness, discursively produced and performed every day by language (Butler, 1990) -
in all its facets: words, actions, images, bodies, media, etc. - is what has made “man” invisible
and universal, de-corporealised and a-sexualised. Inserted in such a model, the various thinkers
throughout history, from the pre-Socratics to the contemporaries, have considered the
masculine as a transcendental human gender, therefore without the need to think – and think
themselves – in terms of gender. In this way, man has convinced himself that he is not
influenced by his own masculinity and can speak for all mankind indiscriminately, becoming
the logos through which the rest declines. In this way, definitions and categories have
developed from hierarchising dichotomisations, which in repetition have found a naturalising
and apriorising force on which we have then founded reflections, relationships, and societies,
such as: man/woman, man/animal, heterosexual/homosexual, citizen/foreigner, able/disabled
and so on. Given this invisibilisation of masculinity, over time we have questioned the
relationship of the speaking subject with nature, with God, with other living beings, but we
have never questioned that such analyses were always the outcome of a man's world produced
and universalised by his own language (Irigaray, 1991, 279).
Reflecting on the relationship between the masculine-neutral and the representation of the
“Self”, thus becomes a fundamental operation to re-signify dominant models, opening paths to
new and non-hierarchical possibilities. Indeed, the constant use of false neutral views – through
conceptual and grammatical aspects – produces a direct impact on the power relations and the
thoughts of every person. The universalization of the male and his body to global possibility
leads, inevitably, to the development of androcentric structures in all fields of knowledge. This
is why there are still discussions today, for example, about gender medicine; in fact, even in
the medical field, the conceptual framework of the I-neutral – reiterated by language – has led
to a focus on the male, excluding other physicalities with dangerous consequences. The
maintenance of this false neutrality implies, therefore, the maintenance of hierarchizing
dichotomies that prevent the achievement of real equality both in daily life and in the
workplace.
The focus of this analysis will therefore be to shed light on these mechanisms, so that further
thought can be given to the development of truly inclusive and neutral communication
strategies that deconstruct patriarchal patterns.
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2. Self-neutral
In relation to the concept of the Self-neutral, is interesting the analysis of Adriana Cavarero,
an Italian philosopher and feminist (whom I will reread from an intersectional and queer
philosophy perspective) in Il pensiero della differenza sessuale (The Thought of Sexual
Difference, 1991), where she writes:
To the ‘I’ of discourse, that same discourse that I am now thinking and saying
in Italian, it happens that its being male or female does not concern it. The subject
‘I’ is male, but it is not gendered. Thus, when one says ‘I am woman’ or ‘I am
man’, the ‘I’ indifferently bears and accepts gendering, being in itself neutral. In
this way, philosophical discourse can legitimize and affirm the ‘I think’ and
make this neutral subject a self. And it can also eliminate the ‘I think’ and simply
say ‘I’ since it is precisely in it that the universal presents itself (1991, 43).
However, that masculine grammatical gender that the self carries within itself somehow
makes this representation of universality wobble. In fact, saying “self”, in a certain way, is
already saying “I am man”. The specification serves only to express to being an “extension” of
it, such as the feminine or what, intersectionally, does not fit into the heterosexual, cisgender,
white, able-bodied, occidental binarism.
So, the question arises: what “body” does the Self evoke in our minds when we use such a
form or concept? Does it really produce an image that is not filled with already established and
hierarchizing meanings?
As emphasized by many thinkers, from Judith Butler to the Italian psychologist Chiara
Volpato, what we evoke in our minds by using the conceptual model of the “neutral” is “the
sign of its subject” (Cavarero, 1991, 47), so the masculine and all that, that term, brings with
it. Therefore, it refers to a thought, to a “materiality”, and therefore to a world-view, in line
with the binary as well as hierarchizing model that considers man as canon. A concrete example
would be, in Italian, the use of the words that refer to professions declined only in the
masculine: such as the example of “magistrato” (male magistrate)3. In this case, not only is the
mental image of a man evoked when using such a term, but it also perpetuates the model that
sees power roles linked to the masculine dimension. Thus, the stereotype of agency, the male
propensity for apical and powerful positions, is reiterated, as opposed to the female
communality, the female propensity for more empathetic and collaborative roles, that instead
nails them to hierarchically inferior roles. It is also interesting here to underline how, with this
linguistic procedure, it welds not only a different role of power between men and women, but,
by using the term "propensity", it emphasizes a conception of inevitable naturalness. So, the
use of terms such as the one used as an example (magistrato) has a dual function: it reiterates
specific social roles and, at the same time, justifies that impartiality through the concept of
“nature”. Declining the term into the feminine (from magistrato to magistrata) for indicating
a female magistrate, is thus a practical and concrete act that challenges the patriarchal model,
not only at the grammatical level but also at the political-conceptual level.
The neutral self, precisely because it is neutral, from the Latin neuter, should position itself
as “neither one nor the other” of two elements considered antithetical. A term etymologically
appropriate to the binary structure, which posits thought primarily through oppositional
dichotomies subordinated to the principle of non-contradiction. However, that self defined as
3 In Italian, the term magistrato, as well as many other words since Italian is a binary language that uses the
masculine-neutral, simultaneously denotes a job related to a male-sexed body (male magistrate) and the non-
sexed magistrate. It is also interesting to argue that the term magistrate is masculine because until a few decades
ago women could not assume that role, so it is the specter of an obviously patriarchal model.
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neutral does not position itself as “neither one nor the other”, but as “one that signifies and
dominates the other”. In fact, the self is never neutral, but masculine, despite being ready to
accept sexualization. A gendering that specifies itself, however, in the declension to what is
not male, since in the masculine it expresses something that its gender already announced. As
Cavarero writes, that announcement “I am a man” is a warning that reveals the sign of the
authentic subject of discourse: a masculine subject who assumes self to be universal (1991,
44). Its use evokes, therefore, the “image” of a particular signifier. It evokes a “body” with
definite anatomical traits – male, white, able-bodied, occidental – which, inevitably, will affect
the thought and world-view of anyone using such “neutral” forms; reiterating models that will
be assumed pre-discursively and, consequently, naturalised (Butler, 1990). An aspect of, the
latter, that Chiara Volpato, in Psicologia del maschilismo (Psychology of Masculinism, 2020),
reports through numerous scientific data collected through psychological and sociological
tests. Methodologically, one of the best tests to assess this is through anonymous interviews or
questionnaires. An emblematic case, which underlines how the use of (false) neutral
grammatical forms – or concepts – generates “masculine” visions and images in mind, are the
differences reported – in Italian school contexts – by the answers to the question: "which is
your favourite writer" and "which is your favourite writer or your favourite female writer?4",
generating very different data that will inevitably influence both the thoughts of the individuals
and the empirical data collected subsequently for statistical calculations. To better understand
this last aspect with a further case, in Italy there is a high disparity in participation, between
men and women, in engineering (men) and obstetrics (women) faculties (as emphasised by
multiple gender balance sheets of Italian universities). This will produce a series of statistics
that will then, rhetorically, be used to emphasise the “natural tendency” of the male, rather than
the female, to orient themselves in certain jobs. In truth, this “tendency” is the outcome of
stereotypical concepts and languages that prescribe the way people should be, based on their
gender; manipulating and influencing their thought, as pointed out by the Turkish-German
activist Kübra Gümüşay (2020), and their ways. There are numerous other cases that could
clarify this, even moving away from the linguistic-grammatical perspective. One of these might
be road safety, where the canon of reference has been, until a few decades ago, the male body
alone. This led to the testing of crash-tests exclusively with dummies constructed from a
stereotypical male body, excluding other physicalities and, consequently, reducing their safety.
This occurred, as already argued, because the male emerges as the "neutral" and universalizable
canon. Referring to Cavarero's logical parable (1991, 43), which to be discussed shortly,
universalizing the male was then mistakenly believed that even the male body could
particularize itself into the rest, holding it as a global model. Highlighting this problematic give
us the opportunity to rethinking of those tests and concretely increasing the security of women
and many other different physicalities.
Returning to the issue of the neuter, we can see how the term “man”, therefore, denotes two
aspects from which a hegemonic rhetoric then developed. On the one hand it denotes, in fact,
a finite, sexualised being. On the other hand, a universal, a-sexed and decorporealised being,
produced by language through an ascending logical parabola that absolutizes precisely the
finiteness of the first aspect. Then, through a descending dynamic, this universality will be able
to comprehend and specify itself, both in that finite masculine that generated it, and in all the
rest, which will be incorporated by the logical process. Thus, there is a circularity where man
4 Like I said in the case of “magistrato”, Italian is a non-neutral language. In fact, in Italian, we use the word
“scrittore” for indicating the “neutral-asexual writer” but also the “male writers” and the word “scrittrice” for
indicating only the “female writer”. So, as Cavarero said, in Italian grammatic the man indicates both the
universal and the particular. It follows that when the term “scrittore” (writer) is used in people's minds,
tendentially, it will create an image of a male man, with the stereotypical traits that everyone gives to the
category "writer".
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is both universal and particular, while the rest is only particular. The particulars then, in a binary
logic, are each other's. But, in truth, man's otherness is founded in man himself who,
preliminarily posing himself as universal, then admits himself as one of the particulars in which
the universal can be specified. On the contrary, woman's otherness is founded in the negative:
the universal-neutral man, particularising himself as “man” sexed in the masculine, finds
himself in front of the man sexed in the feminine, and says that he is other than himself
(Cavarero, 1991, 47). Rereading the philosopher from an intersectional perspective, we could
say that this is also the case for homosexuality, transsexuality and so on, making everything
that is not “male” - white, heterosexual, cisgender, bourgeois - particulars produced by a
neutral-masculine.
In this model, therefore, man occupies a totally different position from every other person
or living being. A model that is constantly reiterated precisely by the use of a language that, by
universalising the particular 'male', performs certain categories and power relations;
constitutively influencing each person, who will assume and be shaped by the language he
inherits and uses. An aspect, the latter, that the Italian philosopher Ferruccio Rossi-Landi
specifies in Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato, (Language as work and as a market,
1968), where he writes:
As a repeater of compulsory and over-personal models, the language worker
finds himself in the situation of not knowing what he is doing when he speaks,
of not knowing why he speaks the way he does, and of belonging to processes
of linguistic production that condition him from the very beginning (1968,
104).
The neuter masculine thus allows the circularity of man between the universal and the
particular, holding the power and control of the – linguistic – bar that cuts through the gendered
“particulars” (man bar (/) non-man), delimiting their boundaries and permissions. Thus,
hierarchising and categorising signifiers, bodies, signifying them. I purposely use the
dichotomy man/non-man to indicate on the one hand the necessity of the neuter-masculine to
render thought binary through hierarchising dichotomous caesuras. On the other to indicate by
“not-man” the dominating structure of man-white-heterosexual-cisgender-western-bourgeois-
able, which establishes every facet of multiplicity, intersectionally, from his universalised self.
It thus appears that man has made himself non-sexual by taking control of language. With
it, he orders and constitutes the world, developing dichotomies and signifying anatomical
bodies, nailing down permissive fates.
In the contemporary neutral self and the logical process that produced it, as Cavarero said
(1991, 47), something monstrous is therefore concealed. Theoretically, in the neutral universal,
nothing should recognise itself, except with the addition of the sexuality that specialises. But,
as we have seen, man fully recognises himself in the neutral universal thanks to that
monstrosity that allows the coexistence of neutral and masculine. In this universal, man is there
with all the concreteness of his whole being - a sexualised and masculinised living being - and
because he is there, he recognises himself, says, thinks and represents himself with a language
that is his own. On the contrary, everything that is not man must be said from a “neutral”
language that has already thought it. The non-man, in short, is not the subject of his own
language, but says and represents self through categories of the other-man's language. Indeed,
the subject of this language has defined himself from the start as identical with language itself:
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“man is a rational animal” (ζῷον λόγον ἔχον5). Man is the living being that holds the language.
Man is the logos; “Man is the one who says things and the world, says himself as the sayer. He
thinks the whole and thinks himself as the thinker” (Cavarero, 1991, 50). All other people, on
the other hand, do not self-represent themselves in language, but receive their man-made
representations. They speak and think, but not from them, but through the inheritance of a
foreign language. A language that is dense, genealogically – in the Foucauldian sense – of
power and domination. Everything that is not man is thinking themselves “thought”, their
“thinking themselves” is a thinking themselves in the language of another who has already
thought them, enclosing them in foreign concepts and predetermined permissions. As Butler
writes in Bodies That Matter:
The construction of gender operates through exclusion, so that the human is
not only produced in replacement and opposition to the inhuman, but through
a series of forclusions, of radical erasures, to which the possibility of cultural
articulation is denied (Butler, 1997a, 26).
Language thus becomes a foreign inheritance. Yet, as Derrida points out in Le
monolinguisme de l’autre (The Monolingualism of the Other, 1996), it is always inheritance,
insofar as it is unformed by us and therefore preceding and constitutive to us. In other words,
language is a constitutively influential inheritance. Consequently, putting the two reflections
together - taking the risk of juxtaposing two distant authorities - we could argue that the
inheritance for non-humans is twofold. They, in fact, inherit a language, in the Derridean sense,
which perpetuates the assumption of a foreign language, which has already thought them, in
the sense of Cavarero's reflection.
By assuming language and becoming its monstrous holder (the neutral-masculine self), man
produced his essence - which he identifies in language itself - defining himself and thinking,
thus establishing, everything else. The first great caesura of difference, on a theoretical-
relational level, in other words the binary sexual difference, occurs precisely from language
and those who hold it; which made it possible to establish the dichotomous models with which
the bodies that inherit it are signified and which, consequently, reiterate that same model,
continually giving it life. From there, then, develop the great binary structures by which man -
and patriarchal masculinity (I use the term patriarchal to specify a masculinity fused with white,
heterosexual, cisgender male dominance) - hold their sway: mind-man/body-woman, culture-
man/nature-woman, and so on. Binarism that exclude a priori everything that does not fit the
model; thus, leaving no room for homosexual, transsexual, fluid thoughts, except as anomalies
or pathologies of the “natural” and “normal” binary and solid reality. Indeed, the fluid, as
identified by Irigaray, and re-read by me in an intersectional and queer key, questions solid and
binary categorical stability:
Occidental logic will refer to and sustain a mechanics of solids. The fluid
will always overflow reason, ratio, overstep the measure, plunge back into the
undifferentiated. Forgetting that without the fluid, this would have no unity,
the fluid always being present between the solid substances to unite them, to
re-unite them: without the operation of the fluids, there would be no discourse.
5 From the Greek "Zoon logon echon" translated to "man is a rational animal" is the famous phrase used by
Aristotle to emphasize man's ability to reason and express himself rationally as a characteristic trait that
distinguishes him from animals. It is important to specify that for Aristotle only man, intended as male, is a
complete human being, while woman is “imperfect.” From which we can deduce that the true and “complete”
rational animal is man, hierarchically superior to woman and therefore possessor, in a higher sense, of reason
and language.
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But the operation of fluids is not enunciated as a condition of truth, of
coherence of the logos. It would mean revealing its unstable construction, its
mobile ground (Irigaray, 1991, 287).
The neutral is thus that element which should have rejected - or at least not made it the
exclusive - logic of binary opposition, of the aut-aut, of heteronormative binarism.
The binary structure of language greatly influences the constitution of the people and them
relationships. As Irigaray points out (1991), all dichotomies, such as being/not being, true/false,
and so on, remain the opposites from which the person bases self to entry into language, where
one is subjected to the principle of non-contradiction. Alternatives are therefore all evaluated,
compared, framed, and determined hierarchically. This leads to a Manichaean view of reality
– as well as truth (in the singular) – developing and welding together rigid and stereotypical
views of self and relationships. However, the neuter alludes to the overcoming of a binarism
that, in truth, welds; reiterating, consequently, male dominance. Today's philosophical and
grammatical neuter is a reiteration of the hierarchical and dichotomous man/woman model,
which provides for a heteronormed binary structure, albeit alluding to the overcoming of that
same binarism.
“Unveiling the false neutrality of such thought and its value of alienating women is the first
necessary step towards a thought that contemplates women as subjects, and precisely as
thinking subjects,” says Cavarero (1991, 56). A reflection that we could also extend
intersectionally beyond the binary logic of man/woman.
So, using truly neutral languages (which involves the use of non-binary structures, or
specific symbols such as schwa) implies not only a direct political and anti-discriminatory
stance, open therefore to the multiple identities present, but will also produce new ways
thinking. Indeed, as previously discussed, using masculine declensions, for example, implies
an evocation of specifically gendered mental images, welding a perception of greater presence,
authority, and competence. In school or corporate contexts, one could, hence, revise
documents, texts, ways of writing e-mails, communiqués, advertisements, using structures that
are open to multiplicity and do not reiterate a particular point of view. Rewriting intended not
only at the grammatical level, but also conceptually, creating, for example, new declensions to
indicate job roles, as well as tests designed on bodies not strictly male.
At the application level, this work is having experimentation in two partner companies of
my research on the Italian territory. In them, I and a colleague of mine, are making several
interventions of rewriting and staff training that is showing positive concrete feedback. We, in
fact, began by drafting an operational program that saw, initially, generic surveys and private,
personalized interviews, and then deepened, as soon as a positive climate was established, with
targeted tests and training courses. After the first year of experimentation, according to the
results of questionnaires and interviews, the perception of discriminatory acts seems to have
diminished and, simultaneously, an increased awareness of linguistic structures, in particular
the false neutrality of the Italian language; leaning toward more open and inclusive forms of
communication in all aspects - verbal, non-verbal and medial communication.
To recapitulate, rethinking the grammatical and conceptual forms inherent in language,
means breaking down a mechanism that places a particular as a universal that, precisely by
holding the logos/language, structures and signifies everything else from its own experience
and position. Using such symbols means removing that oblique bar between man/non-man to
make space for fluidity, for “humanity” in its plurality. Rethinking the concept of the
philosophical “I” means bringing to light the masculine hidden behind the "neutral" and the
symbolic violence it enacts on a daily basis.
In order to combat masculine domination, “we must distrust the neutrality of language, its
scientific objectivity” (Cavarero 1991, 78), since speaking is never neutral. Every word carries
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with it the weight and influence of domination, discrimination, and hatred, penetrating the flesh
and body of those who use and receive such language.
One need only think of the way the history of being called an insulting name
is embodied in the body, how words enter the limbs, shape the gesture, bend
the spine. It would be enough just to think about how racial or gender insults
live and thrive in the flesh of the person to whom they are addressed, and how
these insults accumulate over time, disguising their history, taking on the
semblance of naturalness, shaping and shrinking the doxa, which counts as
reality (Butler, 1997a, 229).
3. Self-neuter and masculinity
The philosophical self thus sees the universalisation of a particular - the masculine - grafted
into a binary man/woman structure, from which all other categories are then defined. In this
logical process, what is man, intersectionally understood, sees a universalisation that leads to
the erasure of one's own sexuality and body. Patriarchal masculinity - and the power relations
it has established - thus becomes something natural and biologically inevitable, disappearing
from the scene and from reflection, being able to become the “neutral” with which the rest can
be thought and described. This “neutrality” is thus a constitutive element of masculinity itself,
which bases itself on a series of rigid characteristics that are genealogically, in the Foucauldian
sense, charged with hierarchising power. Before proceeding, I specify that, as analysed by
Australian sociologist R. W. Connell in Masculinities (1995), there are multiple forms of
‘masculinity’, with multiple facets. Here, however, the intention is to identify the deeper basis
present in most of them, investigating the sociolinguistic praxis present at the bottom and not
the stereotypical characteristics present on the surface and slightly mutable throughout history.
The binarism “neither one nor the other” is the first of these constitutive elements.
Patriarchal masculinity, in fact, needs a dichotomous structure to signify itself, starting with
the alienation of a whole series of characteristics that it cannot possess (such as the procreative
possibility of the body) or does not tolerate in itself (such as emotionality associated with
natural and therefore corporeal elements), then nailing them down in its other, femininity. In
line with Butler's conception of gender performativity (1990), it follows that patriarchal
masculinity acquires its meaning from the - performative - relationship that the signifiers “man”
and “woman” have with each other within a heterosexual binary system. Such signifiers, such
bodies, taken individually, in fact, would mean nothing, they require their other to understand
what is allowed and what is not allowed to be and do. They refer, therefore, to a praxis that
runs on the surface of signifiers which, however, are continually signified from the inheritance
of language and the models it brings with it. The structure of the masculine-neutral is a heavy
mover of this praxis that allows the signification of the male at the expense of the subordination
of the feminine and the exclusion of everything else. Heterosexual binarism is, in short,
necessary insofar as it allows the signification and universalisation of masculinity, exploiting
its other as an element to which to assign what it cannot possess; such as, for example,
procreative possibility (Ciccone, 2019). Indeed, the man must separate himself, forget his
relationship with nature - as opposed to the woman - producing an eidetic structure that enables
his dominating relationship with the other. As Irigaray writes in To speak is never neutral:
An eidetic structure commands the functioning of our truth. Neither entity
nor relation to entity can be named outside the reference to a model that
determines its manifestation as an approximation of its ideal being (1991, 280).
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In this model, what does not fit into heterosexual binarism must be eliminated, discriminated
or incorporated as an anomaly. Thus, in the form of psychic disorders, the homosexual man
simply becomes a feminised (biological) male (imitating characteristics that are
essentialistically and biologically not his own), the woman a masculinised (biological) female,
and so on.
The assumption of language as its essence and the consequent dichotomisation, such as that
between mind-logos-culture and, subordinately, body, has inevitably established power
relations between the constituent parts of binarism itself. Insofar as the mind-logos-culture has
been defined as hierarchically superior to the body-pulsion-nature. The association of the
masculine as mind-logos-culture and the feminine as body-pulsion-nature necessarily sees a
subordination of the feminine. According to the scholar of masculinity and founder of the
Italian “masculine plural” (Maschile Plurale) association Stefano Ciccone, this subordination
is also fundamental to indirectly acquire bodily procreative power that man does not possess.
From this follows a whole series of stereotypical assignments, mutable in the cultural-historical
process, of attitudes, possibilities and aptitudes appropriate to the binary man/woman model;
for example, the man will be competitive, aggressive, strong, while the woman will be
cooperative, emotional, weak, consequently generating paternalistic structures that trace the
superiority of the male-protector to the female-defender.
The association with the mind then led to decorporealisation (understood as the possibility
of domination and disciplining everything about the body) as a necessary aspect of masculinity,
as well as its possibility of becoming universal and neutral. The male's relationship with his
body - silent and accessory - places him in a condition of elevating aspects considered
'incorporeal', such as reason and rationality. This leads to the construction of male identity on
decorporealised elements, which are then elevated to universal and neutral; thus, initiating that
logical process, identified by Cavarero (1991, 43), which sees a circularity between universal
and particular masculinity. The body, therefore, becomes for man only an accessory element,
useful as a tool to show his own physical superiority. The latter being a further rhetorical aspect
of male superiority, but in any case secondary to the main quality, according to this model, of
man: logos.
Hetero-binarism, the subordination of the feminine and decorporealisation are thus
necessary elements for the formation of a specific masculine capable of universalising itself
and becoming, monstrously, neutral, becoming a hegemonic praxis (the patriarchy). This is
because, with language, it was able to create complementary categories, and give them different
positions of power. On the contrary, a queer or fluid vision, would subvert the entire praxis,
because it would break down the meaning and hierarchy power between the parts of binarism,
so, eliminating binarism itself.
In this model, masculinity, in short, does not only contain the category that nails to specific
anatomical bodies. But contains the entire binary praxis that thinks all categories and outlines
their power relations. Masculinity, like man, is both particular: the stereotypical category; and
universal: the patriarchy (in the sense of the praxis of power relations and domination).
Patriarchy as socio-cultural praxis, therefore, creates masculinity (particularly in the sense of
hegemonic masculinity based on the three elements: heterosexual binarism, subordination of
the feminine, and decorporeization) but simultaneously constantly revives through masculinity
itself; in a performative process already identified by Butler.
Bringing masculinity into the realm of philosophical reflection thus implies a deconstruction
of the patriarchal model that has “thought” all other categories, barring (/) the binarisms it
creates to delineate confines and power relations. It also allows a rethinking of masculinity
itself, opening new paths based not on dominant binary relations, but on free possibilities or,
as feminist Rosi Braidotti would say, nomadic identities.
Grandi / Language, neuter, and masculinity. The influence of the neuter-male in the reiteration of…
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4. Conclusion
In conclusion, language is imbued with relational and constituent power, dense with false
neutrality that reiterates patterns of domination. Every datum, from the biological to the
philosophical, is never neutral but, as identified by Foucault, genealogically charged with
knowledge-power. Power dictated both by the direct relationship between language and
thought, and by the capacity of language to signify every aspect of reality, producing models
of domination from categorisations that we retroactively assume to be natural. Models and
concepts that elevated to universals and neutrals - like the philosophical self - we then used to
establish relationships, establish meanings, define social roles, create work structures and so
on. Rethinking the concept of the philosophical self, of the philosophical subject, means
highlighting the masculine-monstrous hidden behind the “neutral”. This is why, says Cavarero,
in order to combat patriarchal masculine domination “we must distrust the neutrality of
language, its scientific objectivity” (1991, 78). Speaking, in fact, is never neutral. Language is
not only anthropological, but also andrological; in other words, that of a sexualised subject that
imposes its imperatives as universally valid (Irigaray, 1991). Each word carries with it the
weight and influence of domination, discrimination, and hatred, penetrating the flesh and body
of those who use and receive such language. Reiterating stereotypes, possibilities, attitudes that
enter into us to the point of shaping and influencing our desires and drives (Butler, 1997b).
Analysing the masculinity that lies behind the false neutrality of certain grammatical structures
and philosophical concepts is a decisive step towards being able to think of a truly neutral and
inclusive gendered language. Breaking down binarism allows for the accommodation of a
multiplicity that would otherwise be encompassed and eliminated. This can be done through
the development of new languages that take the multiple into account and that jam, as well as
unravel, the hierarchising power behind a language steeped in hierarchising binarism.
Working on language, on the structures that compose it, on the neutral, in conclusion, is
what can enable a rewriting of dominant models. As Butler writes in Excitable Speech. A
Politics of the Performative: “it is precisely the expropriation of the dominant ‘authorised’
discourse that constitutes a potential site of its subversive re-signification” (1997a, 157). A
neutral language, therefore, cannot be based on a particular made universal, nor on a solid
binarism that excludes both sides, in the etymological sense of the term: neuter: neither one nor
the other. But it must be based on welcoming the fluid that exists between multiple
particularities. Symbols such as the schwa or the asterisk have precisely the task of indicating
that void that can be filled and specialised in a specific way, as well as remain fluid. A neutral
language must, therefore, stand on the void, on the space that exists between each specificity,
being able to become, from time to time, that specificity that each person is at that precise
moment of his existence.
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