Feminists use language to construct identities and reality

Modern theory takes this idea of Saussure and extends it by coupling it with the idea that because we can only know the world through language then and language does not reflect the world but constructs it

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The whole edifice of anti-essentialism in post-structuralism, postmodernism, feminism and queer theory it will be seen is built upon the ideas, implicitly or explicitly, of the linguist Saussure who argues as Barry notes

“… for Saussure the signifiers which make up a language refer only to one another and interact with one another but do not figure forth a world.[FONT=&quot][1][/FONT].

Saussure’s thinking stressed the way language is arbitrary, relational and constructive and this way of thinking about language greatly influenced the structualists because it gave them a model of a system which is self-contained in which individual items relate to other items and thus create larger structures.”[FONT=&quot][2][/FONT]
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This is a prolegomenon to the study of the mystical elements in anti-essentialism in post-structuralism, postmodernism, feminism and queer theory. The mystical element have so much in common with Buddhist notions on the non-self, the illusory nature of the phenomenal world and the conventional nature of reality. Where Buddhist use these insights to liberate the person from the conventional world, the anti-essentialism in post-structuralism, postmodernism, feminism and queer theory use them to infact bury the person deeper into it via their political ideologies and power politics’. Where Buddhists create a salivation theory - a soteriology - the anti-essentialism in post-structuralism, postmodernism, feminism and queer theory create more ideological prisons and straight jackets which keep people buried in the illusionary world, the theorists acknowledge, rather than helping the people to disentangle themselves from it via the eradicating of conventional ideologies which imprison them and which these theories consciously manufacture. It is as if the theorists have discovered the Buddhist insights but rather than help release people from conventional reality they infact create propaganda and mind control techniques to keep people from the realizations that will free them from the conventional realities these theorist acknowledge themselves. These theorists from a Buddhist point of view are trying to construct identities based on their ideologies rather than deconstruct identities based upon their insight of dencentered selves and reality. They turn around their insights to use for political and power politics against the people as no more than ideological propaganda to control -a fairly typical western preoccupation- and infact camouflage the illusory conventional world via their manufactured constructions of truth

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[FONT=&quot][1][/FONT] . P, Barry, Beginning theory, Manchester university press, 2002 p 113.

[FONT=&quot][2][/FONT] Ibid,. p. 44.

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Does he, by any chance, use language in order to do that?

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