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About female narration

The topic of my dissertation is the gender inequality in the usage of written and spoken language
which I will demonstrate through an unusual discovery in films. I am going to start dissecting the
topic from very far away to the point that it will almost seem like I may have forgotten about the
topic but I hope in the end I can ultimately come around to a conclusion.
Long before the beginning of the excitements of writing a thesis, in the spring of 2018, I came across
one of Virginia Woolf’s books „A room of one’s own”. The book begins with the foreword written by
Frances Spalding, a contemporary British art historian: „Much has changed since 1929 when “A room
of one’s own” first issued. The situation of women in society has changed; we no longer suffer as
much from the lack of money and power as before. „– How reassuring – I thought to myself as I had
begun reading the first piece of art of my life that had feminism as its main topic.
As early as 1949, Simone de Beauvoir begins her book “The second sex” as follows: “For a long time I
have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not
new. Enough ink has been spilled in the quarrelling over feminism, now practically over and perhaps
we should say no more about it." (De Beauvoir, 1949, p. 1)

Probably if “One’s own room” had started with an uncovered feminist proclamation then
I would not be writing this dissertation today. But fortunately it wasn't like that. In 1928 Virginia
Woolf was invited to the University of Cambridge to give a lecture on the relationship between
women and fiction. This immediately chimed with me, since I myself deal in fiction. Woolf’s main
references were the works of the Bronte sisters (Jane Eyre, Howling Winds) and Jane Austen
who were the pioneer female writers of the 19th century. Above all, Woolf exudes their outstanding
courage and their determination to dare to write at a time when they were still not barely allowed to
take a walk alone, let alone grab a pen.

While telling about these excellent writers and about the circumstances under and
despite which, they managed to take the time for writing – such as constant disturbances,
housework,
children, unpleasant, uninvited guests, the impossibility of presentation and countless
derogatory criticism – Virginia started researching in the library of the British Museum. Within the
maelstrom Books, titles, and authors she had come upon a curious revelation. „...genders and their
nature are rightly of interest to doctors and biologists, but what is surprising and difficult to explain is
the fact that gender - the female gender, to be precise - attracts essayists, novelists, young, graduate
men. Men who have no degree, men who have absolutely no qualifications, but in the least men
who are not women.” (Woolf, 1929.). This is summed up by the 18th century French Cartesian
philosopher Poulain de la Barre: “All that ever a man wrote about a woman is suspicious because the
man is judge and litigant in one person.” (De Beauvoir, 1949, p.1.) - Whose quote Simone de
Beauvoir makes the motto of her important feminist book: The second sex.

Let’s get back to Virginia Woolf, who continues as follows: „...It is unfortunate that these wise men
never think the same about women. Here is the pope. Most women have no personality at all (...) are
they able or unable to study? Napoleon thought they were unable. Johnson Dm. claimed the
opposite. Do they have a soul or do they not? Some legends say they do not. Some on the contrary
believe them to be demigods, and as such respect them. Some believe them to be shallow minded,
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others claim their minds are deeper. Goethe respected women, Mussolini despised them. Wherever
a person would look different every man would have a different opinion about women, and it was
impossible to find certainty. (Woolf, 1929, p. 43)

To put it plainly, Virginia Woolf missed – let me remind you that this was back in 1928 – the female
voice in literature. When Woolf analyzes the situation of the first, pioneer female writers of the 19
hundreds, other than her circumstances she brings up a much less obvious but all the more
interesting aspect: the aspect of language tradition. She assumes that other than the ruthless critique
(for example: criticism from the pen of a contemporary man: „... Female novelists excel if they are
able to accept the limits defined by their gender”) and discouragement there is a n even greater
obstacle: the fact that their writing has no past or tradition that could help them. ”... And that was
that there was no tradition behind them or so short and partial only that it could not provide much
help. Because if we are women, we remember through our mothers. We turn uselessly to great male
writers for help, no matter how often we turn to them for enjoyment Lamb, Browne, Thackeray,
Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quincey – or be anyone else – they could never help a single woman
ever, even if she could have learned a few tricks from them and used those for her own purposes.
The weight, pace and tempo of a man’s thoughts differ so greatly from her own, that she could never
successfully learn anything essential. (Woolf, 1929)

In my reading Woolf when writing this, does not mean that it is pointless to read great (male) writers’
works as a woman, because of the greatly different perceptions of the World as a whole, rather it
seems to me that she touches on something that lies deeper. Weight, pace and tempo can signify the
construction of the language. This is the structure that has no tradition when it comes to women. A
person’s freedom as well as their freedom of thought are imperative to their language and thought
development. In Japan for example only until a few decades ago, women were not allowed to use the
imperative voice towards a man in formal writings. Freedom of expression as one of the most
important cornerstones of art is the freedom that had been denied for so long of the „weaker”
gender, and what is still not complete in 2019.

To what extent and what effect could the oppression of women have had on language development?
What would our language be like today if emancipation had reared it’s head centuries ago instead of
only 100-150 years ago? If the two genders had formed the language hand in hand and they would
have played an equal part in language renewal from time to time? What’s more, what impact would
it have had on our society if the path of language had developed differently, in the spirit of equality?

Woolf says: „... a book does not merely consist of sentences one after the other, but the sentences
stacked one after the other to form buildings, arcs, and domes. These forms were created by men as
they served their own comfort. There is no reason to think that the form of a narrative, a poem or a
sentence fits a woman. But by the time women became a writers, the foundations of literature had
already been cemented by men.” (Woolf, 1929)

If we talk about the differences between women and men, we get to the difference in thinking soon
after the primary biological differences, so it is clear they approach an issue following a different
logic. Now, communication between the two genders – and communication itself happens through
language. And what is language? By its most precise definition, language is the most important
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means of direct human communication, expressing external and internal reality more accurately than
any other sign system. Language is the most universal sign system.

Is it possible that the female gender has to express, its external and internal reality, through a system
of signs based on the logic of the other gender? If this is the case, then this was the case in 1928, and
so it is in 2019.

Starting from this lay follow-up, I came to the questions that I propose in my dissertation. Because it
was one thing to slip by the gender of the author, this has been achieved. – Now in 2019 a woman
can write and publish a novel, a volume of poems without a pseudonym and shame - but how much
have we made the language our own? Is it not language that bears the deepest imprint of the
inequalities that still exist from the very beginning, and if so, is it even possible to change that?

LINGUISTIC APPROACH

I turned to linguistics first. I was secretly sure that it would prove in a short way that my suggestions
had been chewed by scientists for a long time and that exact answers were waiting in the
encyclopedias. I was wrong.

I asked Olivia Seidl-Péch, associate professor and linguist, for help in finding literature, who herself
was surprised by the topic to be researched and emphasized that, to her knowledge, the extent to
which male gender had influenced the development of languages has not been really researched yet.

She recommended David Crystal’s ”The encyclopedia of language” as a starter. In the book the
chapter ”origin of language” begins as follows: „People have been concerned for centuries with the
question of the origin of human language. What was the oldest spoken language in the world? Do all
the languages of the world come from one stem? What language did they speak in the Garden of
Eden? How were the words born in the beginning? These are truly interesting questions that have
fascinated humanity for more than three thousand years now. However, the research is still fruitless.
Each generation asks these questions and comes to a conclusion, taking into account the
unpredictable historical depths; nothing can be said for sure. we do not have any direct knowledge of
the early periods of language development.” (Crystal, 1997, p.360.)

I continued reading in surprise. „After speculations and informal debates in previous centuries,
serious attempts have been made in recent years as to whether modern science can say anything
about the origin of human language? This discipline is called glossogenetics. It explores how human
language is formed and developed in humans, in the individual, and in the race. This discipline builds
on the results of biology (especially sociobiology), anthropology, psychology, semiotics, neurology
(due to research into brain evolution), primatology, and linguistics.” (Crystal, 1997 p. 363.)

In order to get to the information I was interested in, I first had to start from the anthropoids all the
way through. In the bipedalism - and in reaching the physiological state approaching today - the
physiology of the early humans was even different from that of humans today. Thus, for what we call
human language today, they were incapable. The equipment of the pharynx, tongue, throat, oral
cavity, as well as their skulls, were very different from ours. It is unlikely that they communicated in
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spoken language 4-5 million years ago, or even i.e. the Neanderthals who lived between 70,000 and
35,000. But all of this is also just speculation, plus this only applies to spoken language, while it could
easily be that the language was initially some kind of sophisticated gesture system like cave drawings
or today’s sign language.

In the relationship between prehistory and language, science does not consider gender differences to
be a factor to be taken into account. Discrimination of social gender is mentioned only in the case of
civilized man. „Civilized man”, in this case, should not be considered the man living in the city, but
read the word in its Freudian interpretation, that is, as a man burdened by the mechanisms of
inhibition.

As communication developed, a deeper understanding became possible between people, but at the
same time, misunderstanding and the feeling of being misunderstood should have developed. As
Crystal says, language is the ultimate means of human communication. As Crystal says, language is
the ultimate means of human communication. However, with some irony, we can also say that it is
also the main obstacle to human communication. Here I am not even thinking of the scattering of
Babel and the differences in language families, but of the fact that the gap between people who
speak one language can be huge, simply because of the differences in the individual.
Misunderstanding and feeling of being misunderstood breed tension and sadness. Humans were a
social being from the beginning, and as such, they did not want to be left alone in not being
understood. And the fear of being left alone overcomes anger and sadness, these authentic
emotions, and silences them. This is the basic theory of the Freudian school of psychoanalysis.
Memories and motivations that become unconscious through repression have a big impact on a
person’s behavior. In a group, the question of dominance always arises and the less civilized this
group is, the more dominance is concentrated in the hands of those representing physical strength.
What was physical power in the beginning is power, money, and social respect today.

Analyzing the speeches of men and women, Crystal writes, “I like the fact that the dominance of men
in conversation reflects their traditional power in society and that women also take on the
supporting role they have been taught. Namely, to provide men with opportunities to express their
dominance during the conversation. The situation is undoubtedly more complicated than this, as
none of them is linguistically homogeneous, and there is considerable variety when studying real
speech situations. As some explanations have pointed out, the real danger is that while criticizing old
sexual stereotypes, researchers will create new ones instead. ” “In this regard, one of the
characteristics of women is that they ask more questions, use more often the“ noises ”that facilitate
and encourage communication (e.g., mhm, right), have a wider range of intonation, and are more
likely to live with the you and we pronouns, on the other hand, men are more likely to cut into their
other words (more than three times more often than women, according to some studies), to argue,
to ignore, or to respond inadequately, to introducing new topics into the conversation, and they
state facts or opinions several times.” (Crystal, 1997, p.33.34.)

If what we convey through language - that is, our thoughts, our feelings - influences the relationship
between the sexes, that means that language itself is determined by the social system in which it was
born and further developed.
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As an example: In Virginia Woolf’s time, there were more and more female writers, yet the whole
spirit of the age was not permeated by women’s freedom and recognition by the other gender was
still rare. What is surprising is that often the harshest criticisms of women writers were not made by
men but by women. Those who had a sacred belief that women’s brains in general were smaller are,
or - in other words - less competent, and they were not afraid to voice this. Therefore, they could not
be blamed, and Woolf agreed. Hundreds of years of pattern were reflexively followed by their
thinking, while they could have experienced the truth on their own skin, but the attachment was
stronger than the subjective experience.

During my high school history studies, I have already realized that if I want to find my own gender in
the history of old, I am forced to rely on my imagination, for women and their actions are hardly
parts of history. We have a wealth of information about the actions, habits, and art of men from
prehistory to the present day, some of which also form general education, which naturally affects us
subconsciously. In general education, knowing what men have done in the last 2,000 years is the
norm. Knowing what women have done during this is at the most a footnote.

„HERSTORY”

Joan Wallach Scott, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and a researcher in women's history
- because there is such a thing - has published several books on the subject, unfortunately in
Hungarian there is only one edited volume: “Do women have a history?” section. One of her most
important volumes is titled “The Fantasy of Feminist History,” the title of which should be
reconsidered, revealing that feminist history — if it is before the 20th century — exists merely
through fiction. From this point of view, Woolf's study of the relationship between women and
fiction is even more important. Now that we are past the struggle for existence anyway, we may
have a truce to assess how desperately women need fiction. They have to write their own history.

Among the goals of the 1960s feminist movement, we find for the first time that women incorporate
not only their presence but also their important contribution to historical events. “If the
subordination of women — past and present — is only a partial consequence of their invisibility,
emancipation could be facilitated and accelerated by making them visible in historical and
sociological accounts.” (Wallach Scott, 1996, p. 1) writes Wallach Scott, “Feminism and History”. in
the introduction to the collection of his essays in 1996.

Related to this is the term “herstory,” which is a historical concept, the essence of which is to
highlight the positive deeds and actions of women in the historical narrative. For example, as part of
the “herstory” initiative, a phone application has been created that is tailored to American high
school history books, and if the student points the phone camera at the pages of the book, the men
and their stories (“hisstory”) appear on the phone screen instead of their female equivalents. But the
question arises, how much does story-telling based on speculation or fiction have to do with the
truth? These stories often paint an overly positive picture of women’s participation.

Jacques Derrida, a postmodern French philosopher, whom I will deal with later, writes in connection
with a psychoanalytic examination of a text: "If we want to distinguish science from fiction, we must
ultimately resort to the criterion of truth." “Literature,” then, can create, stage, and bring to the fore
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something like the truth it is capable of. This means, it is more powerful than the truth it is capable
of. “And if truth dwells in fiction, will fiction be true, or will truth be fictitious?” (Derrida, 1997, Book
II)

When analyzing the herstory, I think that psychoanalytic text analysis can be a good approach,
because in this case, in the absence of accurate data, the historical narrative can actually be
considered as literary, fictional narratives. This involves many contradictions. J. Wallach Scott, for
example, sees “herstory” in historiography as a downright flawed approach. “Actually, I think
”herstory” is a flawed concept in the sense that not just one ”herstory” exists. We can talk about
several "histories" in the same way. The essence of history is also to learn about things we didn’t
have information about before. Through this, tendencies, past causes of certain events and driving
springs can be explained. Let’s not forget that the word history has a feminine aspect as well, a
definition even! History in both Latin and French is feminine, this is very important! The wording
“herstory” is thus illustrative of the fact that I have made it sensitive to the power relations between
the sexes and how this has changed may have changed throughout history. ”
(ujkor.hu, 2017.07.01., http://ujkor.hu/content/a-noknek-is-van-tortenelmuk-interju-joanwallach-
scott-tal)

In addition to J. Wallach Scott, it is important to mention Ethan Kleinberg, a professor of literature

and history at Wesleyan University who co-founded the #TheoryRevolt movement with Scott and
Gary Wilder. The movement heralds a change of perspective in the theoretical and critical view of
history. "The goal of critical history is to understand the existing world, to question the endowments
of our present, and to find openings to possible new worlds."
(theroryrevolt.com, 2019, http://theoryrevolt.com/post-truth).

One of their most important endeavors is to question the norms of our thinking and thus paddle into
new, more dangerous waters where they admit the boundaries of fiction and truth are blurred. It is
no coincidence that one of Kleinberg’s main areas of expertise is postmodern European thinking,
French and German critical theory. Kleinberg also calls our age the age of post-truth. Post-truth, one
of the positive benefits of which is the aforementioned “herstory,” and the negatives of which
include Holocaust denial, denial of climate change, vaccination, and anti-drug resistance. How post-
modernism and post-truth lead to Holocaust denial is what Daniel Dennett, a contemporary
American philosopher, put it in 2017: “What post-modernists did is really diabolical. They are
responsible for the spiritual trend that holds respectable cynicism against truth and fact. When
people say: "Oh! Are you part of the crowd who still believes in the facts?" (The Guardian, 2017, own
translation) .So examined from a postmodern perspective, the relationship between truth and fiction
comes to an interesting light, similarly from the perspective of critics of post-modern philosophy.

The idea of the Theory Revolt movement starts with the post-modern European philosophers who
were the first to try to dismantle and deconstruct the language in order to find the above-mentioned
openings through which they could reach a possible new world. To a new world that is freed from
the hierarchy of binary oppositions that infect our society and psyche and thus achieves a purer form
of freedom.

Postmodern philosophical approach

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“Looking for a trace of gender in philosophy, it seems that philosophers wrote more often about the
female gender than about the male. However, the first impression is misleading, for the woman is
always in relation to the man, who is unspokenly there as a point of reference, but not as a
representative of his sex as one of the two sexes, but as a Man as the representative of the general
human being. On one side stands the woman as the representative of gender, and on the other the
man as the representative of the concept of human. We may have the impression that philosophers
have rather neglected the male gender in their works, while they often discuss the woman because
what they might say about the man — if they speak of gender at all — has already been said about
humans. In this way, the woman alone becomes a representative of the gender difference, and even
a representative of the gender (sexuality) itself, while the man is the representative of the human
and its essential features. This hidden logic makes the relationship between the two sexes
hierarchical in a philosophical sense. ” (de Beauvoir, 1949, p. 8) - says de Beauvoir.

Linguistically, this attitude is also supported by Crystal when she writes about female and male
speech styles native to Japan: “… far less research deals with men’s speech styles, reflecting the
tradition of considering women’s speech style as a ‘special ’version; rarely they give a separate label
to the male style, but the masculine style can be clearly defined and also appears in the contexts
characterized by traditional notions of masculinity (determination, toughness, etc.).” (Crystal, 1997,
p.34.)

The hierarchy is most vividly illustrated in binary oppositions or dichotomies, which underlie the
general worldview, in which one concept can always be clearly linked to a man’s idea and the other
to a woman’s. Such opposition e.g. form - matter, desire - mind, soul - body, culture - nature. "The
relationship between the members of a pair of opposites is hierarchical: they represent
subordination, that is, a relationship of domination, so that, for example, reason dominates desires,
or one member (form) determines the other (matter)." (Derrida, 1997, Body book II.)

Logically, these are more adversarial pairs of opposites (A and non-A), not simple opposites (A and B),
which is very important from a philosophical point of view. It would be quite different if the
opposition stood between A and B, for example, the biblical story of creation would begin and end
with this sentence: "God created humans in his own image, in the image of God created them as
male and female." (Bible, St. Stephen's Society, Gen. 1:27.) But since the opposition is not between A
and B, but between A and not A, the story is added in the Bible: “Therefore, the Lord God gave man a
dream, and when he fell asleep, he took out one of his side bones and filled it’s place with meat.
Then the Lord God created the woman from the side bone taken from the man and led her to the
man. The man said, "It's already bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh. Woman is her name
because she came from a man." (Bible, translation of St. Stephen's Society, Ter.2.21.) - Therefore the
woman is by nature a disabled being, an unsuccessful man - thought from Aristotle to St. Thomas.

Simone de Beauvoir states in her book „The Second sex” that this kind of dichotomy entails: “A
woman is a relative being, not defined in relation to herself, but in relation to a man. A woman is
what the man makes it, in “gender,” for example, it is expressed that in the eyes of a man it is
primarily a being of the opposite sex: the woman is sexy to the man, so in the absolute sense ... The
man is the Subject and the Absolute, the woman is the other.
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The root of another important theory, the anxiety of castration, which is the fear of deprivation of
the penis, is also rooted in the biblical creation story. This fear, however incredible, is very important
to language. The narrative of world history clearly conveys an androcentric (i.e., male-centered)
worldview to us. This has not changed much in the last hundred or one hundred and fifty years,
precisely because of the feminists of the 60s. Because women are missing from the stories. American
feminist theorist Nancy K. Miller says the misunderstanding is there to disguise male-based norms as
universal norms.

It is also very interesting to observe how many things we think of along the adrocentric schemes as
emancipated women who consider ourselves equal. Even though we work, vote and make decisions,
we have hardly changed our speech yet. The language of the androcentric world is phallogocentric,
and as such, this symbolic system has a constitutive effect on the subject, that is, by using language
we condition our subconscious. In doing so, we limit ourselves to certain patterns of conformed
behavior and thinking.

The Phallogocentric Language

The ancient Greek word ‘misogunía’, which means hatred of women, is not unknown to anyone,
much less its counterpart is ‘misandría’ (miso - hatred, andro- man, man). Misogyny and misandry in
English. In a male-centered world, the word female hatred comes up, not its counterpart, male
hatred. He who hates man hates humans themselves, one might think, on the basis of a
psychoanalytic examination of language, since if philanthropy is (phil - love, anthro - man, human),
then hatred of men is also hatred of the human race.

“The magic words of Derrida’s philosophy sound familiar to all the humanities of the world:
deconstruction, grammatology, dissemination, distinction, logo- and phonocentrism. One of my
favorite pastimes was to redefine the ancient pairs of opposites that provided a safe framework for
our thinking, or, as he would say, to move the binary oppositions out of their usual equilibrium. He
did not believe in the rules, he denied the existence of genres. He connected everything with
everything to show that only the all-pervading power of difference exists; all clichés, patterns are
made artificially.
(magyarnarancs.hu, Bugyinszki György, 2004, https://magyarnarancs.hu/konyv/
nincs_igazsag_jacques_derrida_1930-2004-52948)

Phallogocentrism is a concept in deconstructivist philosophy. And deconstructivism is one of the

trends in postmodern philosophy that is associated with Derrida’s name.

What does the word phallogocentric mean? The syllable “fallo” represents the word phallus, and
“logo” means the Latin logos which means word. So the term means that language is centralized
around the male gender, the male genitalia, and excludes the female gender, the female genitalia.
Phallogocentric language theory was the first evidence that the question I formulated at the
beginning of my dissertation (“May one gender, the female, be forced to express its external and
internal reality through the logic-based sign system of the other?”) is not entirely unfounded.
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To get to know the theory, I first had to read Edgar Allen Poe’s The Stolen Letter then Jacques Lacan’s
essay „Seminar on The Stolen Letter” and only finally did I get to Derrida’s The Postman of Truth.

According to Lacan and Derrida’s starting point, there is nothing but the text, that is, all the
information in the text. Freud’s theories and psychoanalysis are used to pre-extract the information,
with the aim of mapping the symbols of the text, in other words, discarding the text.

Poe quotes his narrative from the summary of Derrida, Danish Royal Princess and Psychoanalyst
Marie Bonaparte: “The Queen of France, like Elizabeth Arnold, has a sinful and secret
correspondence with X, the author of the letter, whose identity remains obscure. The evil minister,
for the sake of political blackmail and in order to strengthen his power, steals one of the letters
before the Queen's eyes: the King's presence paralyzes the woman, for he must not know. The letter
has to be found. All police investigations are accompanied by failure. Fortunately, Dupin is here!
Armed with glasses that cover his eyes, he still sees everything, goes to the minister under some
pretext and discovers the letter: in a clearly visible business card holder, “it hung on a brass nail
under the center of the mantelpiece”. With a subsequent trick, he obtains the compromising sheet of
paper and replaces it with a false letter. The queen, who will eventually receive the real letter, has
escaped. ” (Derrida, 1997, p.80.) So this story, that is, the veil, is to obscure the real story. And what
Bonaparte, Lacan, and Derrida believe to be found under the veil: “We note that the letter, the true
symbol of the mother’s penis, hangs there over the opening of the fireplace, just as a woman’s penis
would hang — if she had it — over the cloaca depicted here, a common symbol of the fireplace, as in
previous tales. . A real topographic anatomy board that lacks the button and even the clitoris. But
something completely different should hang on this button. ”(Derrida, 1997, Postman of Truth, p.81)

“For Bonaparte, too, the castration of the woman (the mother) is the ultimate meaning, of the stolen
letter. And the truth, the re-conformity or acquisition: a desire to fill the hole. ”(Derrida, 1997,
Postman of Truth, p.78)

Reading for the first time, this is a rather absurd interpretation that a lay reader might never have
imagined behind the text. To accommodate this, we need to understand that we are not analyzing
the history of a text subject to psychoanalysis, but its fabric, as Woolf would say, the weight, pace,
and tempo of thoughts at which we try to discover the traces left by individual and collective
subconscious.

According to the approach of psychoanalytic researchers of language, text is a symbolic system

through which the subconscious is able to communicate. "The truth that must be found, then, is not
an object beyond the subject, the correspondence of speech to an object, but the correspondence of
whole speech to itself, its self-authenticity, the identity of its action with its own original essence."
(Derrida, 1997, Postman of Truth p.109.) The text asks and answers at the same time. “The
transcendental position of the phallus thus has (in the chain of signifiers to which it itself belongs and
which it makes possible) its own place — in Lacani's term , pinned letter which withdraws itself from
all divisions — in the phonematic structure of language. None of the protests against this
metalanguage opposes phallogocentric transcendentalism. Especially if we direct it to the sound in
metalanguage, that is, to the ideal place of the phallus. ” (Derrida, 1997, Postman of Truth, p. 85.)
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Because, according to Derrida, the signs are made exactly by the difference between them and the
things to be marked. For nothing can be a counterpart to itself, but any reproduction or forgery is
also something original; original of itself. (magyarnarancs.hu, György Bugyinszki, 2004,
https://magyarnarancs.hu/konyv/
nincs_igazsag_jacques_derrida_1930-2004-52948)

r. Chaterine Mann, American feminist writer, university professor, Domination is Abomination.

author of a book summarizing research over the past ten years on the oppression of women from
sociological, psychological, women’s history, and other perspectives.

He explains the theory much more simply than the original Derrida text. He argues that women need
to reshape the phallogocentrism of language. Starting with little things like when we greet a mixed-
sex group like, “Hi guys!” Or that in wailing we say“ Oh my God ”instead of saying“ Oh Goddess ”.
Looking at the mainstream culture, we can also find good examples. For example, Beyoncé, a twenty-
three-time Grammy-winning American R&B singer, has just released her concert film broadcast on
Netflix. The film, Beyoncé claims, was made to the core in the spirit of feminism and social equality.
The film is narrated by Dr Maya Angelou, a poet and civil rights activist who died in 2004, and also
features Nina Simone. By the way, Beyoncé is the first black woman to open the Coachella Music and
Arts Festival in California as a headliner. The two-hour mega show, which’s viewership rivals the
Superbowl and is truly full of feminist content, glows with the anger and pride that the female issue
and ethnicity evoke in the performer at the same time. In the middle of the concert, so in an
emphasized place, the singer will perform “Flawless”. The lyrics of the song is a good representation
of what Dr. Chaterine Mann is talking about when she says that we need to use language consciously
if we want to change.

Beyoncé : Flawless
“ I know when you were little girls You dreamt of bein' in my world
Don't forget it, don't forget it Respect that, bow down bitches (Crown)
It took some time to live my life But don’t think I’m just his little wife.”

-the last line referring to her similarly famous husband, producer and rapper: Jay-Z.

The following lines are given by the lines of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian contemporary
novelist who spoke at the 2012 London TedX, which later gained over five million viewers: “we
should all be feminists”
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg3umXU_qWc )

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller

We say to girls: "You can have ambition, but not too much
You should aim to be successful, but not too successful
Otherwise, you will threaten the man”

“ Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage

I am expected to make my life choices
Always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important "
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"Now, marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support
But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage
And we don't teach boys the same? “

"We raise girls to see each other as competitors

Not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing
But for the attention of men"

"We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are
Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political
And economic equality of the sexes"

The curiosity of the lyrics, in addition to the fact that feminism is present at this level in mainstream
culture, lies in the dissonance between the chorus and the rest of the lyrics. Unfortunately, the
attempt is still not conscious enough so during the chorus, out of habit - exactly according to the
norms of a tradition in which women were not involved, be it literature or any performing arts, so
something for which full possession of liberties is obligatory – shouts into our faces to “bend over,
whore”.

Beyoncé has been attacked by several people for the lyrics, an article in the Washington Post titled
“Beyoncé sabotages her female empowerment efforts with “Bow Down ’’ and The Conversation
magazine: ‘‘ Bow down, bitches ’: when celebrity feminism goes wrong’. communicated their
criticism. Both articles highlighted the reckless, paradoxical use of the terms “bend over” and
“whore,” some called the song downright “antifeminist”. Beyoncé responded to the attacks in an
Itunes Radio interview: “The reason I wrote the“ bend over ”part of the song, I woke up in the
morning, went into the studio, had a tune in my ear, was aggressive and angry. If anyone says “This is
disrespect” just imagine the man who hates them, who doesn't believe in them. Look in the mirror
and say “bend over whore” I guarantee you will feel like a gangster”

(ibtimes.com, 2019, https://www.ibtimes.com/beyonce-explains-bow-down-it-was-beyoncewas-

angry-1515280)

Dr. Chaterine Mann calls on us to weed out such “little things”. Probably if the foundations of rap or
R&B were laid together by women and men, there would be no as clear address to the bitch in
addressing any female individual as it would not be so obvious in language to say “hi guys” to a mixed
group. Instead of saying “hello, chicks,” which is the same image association, just for some reason
one seems very “normal” and the other looks very not.

About female narration

Whether it’s the voice of a writer, the voice of a historical figure, a superstar singing in front of
millions, or the voice of an activist fighting for the future, it’s important that both genders are equally
represented everywhere. There are sectors where women are more easily involved and there are
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places where the self-evident nature of the patriarchy makes change impossible. I would like to
highlight one such branch.
A narrator is a person who in a communication process, usually professionally conveys the message
to us, recipients (dubbing actor, TV announcer, advertising person, commentator, etc.), usually in a
situation in which an ongoing event is explained to us through some communication channel.
According to the Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases, narrator (lat.): “1. narrator, narrator of
the story; 2. (theatrical, film) the actor outside the dramatic act, who, as the mouthpiece of the
author, tells the events necessary to understand the stage act but is not depicted, often influences
the emotional behavior of the audience with his comments accompanying the performance.

The cinematic varieties of narration can be grouped according to viewpoints. It can be using first
person, second person and third person. Within narration from a third person’s view we distinguish
between the limited narrator and the omniscient. It is also important to distinguish between diegetic
and non-diegetic narration. We call narration a diegetic if the narrator is within the plot world, that
is, if they are present, they physically appear in the story. We call a non-diegetic if the narrator is out
of the plot, if they are not part of the story, they are merely the mouthpiece of the author's will to
speak.

First person narrated films, which feature a female narration that tells a story in person, has many
examples. Most of the time, the first-person narration is diegetic. This pairing is mostly used when
the story is very personal, specifically wanting to present the protagonist’s point of view. A common
example is that such films are adaptations of literary works. Third person narratives appear in films
such as The Lover (1992), Titanic (1997), Bridget Jones’s Diary 1 (2001) and 2 (2004), Kill Bill (2003),
or Juno (2007). In this genre, it is not at all surprising that the narrator is a woman; female voices are
almost “exiled” here. This type of narration goes hand in hand with the genre of romantic film, a
genre that is unspokenly branded as a genre of women. Examining these films separately, we see
that although the narrator is a woman, her purpose or motivation is always about the man. In Bridget
Jones, party finding, marriage is motivation, in Kill Bill love revenge drives the protagonist, in Juno
youth pregnancy and relationship are the issues. Just as de Beauvoir said, “A woman is what a man’s
judgment makes her” (de Beauvoir, 1949, p. 8) be it a whore, a warrior, or a mother, it does not
become that by itself, but the man or lack of it makes her someone.

The second-person narration isn’t really the film’s own, at least certainly not when looking at full
films. Rather, we find examples of this when one character begins to tell a story to another character,
and then the live speech suddenly transforms into a narrative as the images in the film begin to
illustrate the story told by the character. For example, He's Just Not That Into You (2009). a romantic
comedy that is actually a user guide for women to discover if they are not needed enough by the
man.

A third person narrator is called a true narrator. It is the most traditional among the narratives and as
such always sounds in a male voice. There is not a single feature film in which there is a non-diegetic
(not by one of the characters) female narration in a third person. Such a narration is perhaps most
similar to the voice of God, who sees the world involved in the story in such a way that he is not
really present, disembodied. There is a close parallel between the image of the male god and the fact
that the man is the narrator of all time. A woman cannot see everything, cannot rise to such a
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position of power, at least this is what our subconscious has been conditioned for a long time, even
transgenerationally.

It’s as if the woman is only able to tell her own romantic story and can’t go to a more universal level
than that. Interestingly, the role of the narrator in life is not far from the role of women at all. In the
beginning, the first human experience of the fetus that connects them to the outside world is the
voice of the mother. Later, even during childhood, the evening tale and, in general, storytelling is the
mother’s job stereotypically, but as this act, storytelling rises to a professional quality, it clearly
transforms into a man’s privilege.

The theme of the female point of view, the almighty voice and eyes is dissected in In a world… (2013)
written and directed by American director Lake Bell. The film is about a young dub actress, Carol, the
youngest daughter of a great old man in the profession. Carol can’t make a living from the narration
of trailers, commercials and feature films because as her father puts it, “let’s face it, the profession
doesn’t need female voices”. By a lucky coincidence, Carol records the text of a preview of an
upcoming series, which the executive producer listens to and later gives Carol the job at the expense
of the rumbling, deep, scary and sexy male voices known to everyone. Carol would already be
immersed in the success and awareness that she too could be good enough for this profession when
the producer informs me, “I will be honest. Of course, you have a great tone, a nice, strong voice,
which fits exactly this genre. But I use you for a bigger purpose. This is the pseudo-feminist, teenage
fantasy, about this girly bullshit (the series for which the advertisement is made. own remark), a
regression of female roles. It has a bad effect on women’s intelligence. You got the job because
whether it is accepted by society or not, the work of the announcer is very important. Everyone in
the world watches trailers, everyone in the world watches commercials on TV and hears them on the
radio, and that’s great power. This quadrology (the series, own note) will bring in billions of dollars,
and your voice will inspire every woman who hears it. That is why I chose you, not because you are
the best, because it is not you. "

How much you can hear your voice depends on who has how much power. It is therefore important
for both women and men to be present in all forms of the performing arts, because this can mean
that they also have equal proportions of power. If there are no universal female storytellers, how
would a girl think she might be able to tell a story other than her own. How could she feel she is good
enough to interpret a historical or political or economic event if the outside world suggests that his
voice is too subtle, too erotic, too cute, in a word, seriously. The subconscious scheme that makes us
almost automatically choose a male voice as the narrator of a “more serious” film proves - contrary
to Frances Spalding’s assertion - that the world has still not changed enough since 1929 that the age
of binary oppositions has not yet been sacrificed. As in so many areas of life, awareness can be the
key to language use. Be it the language of literature, film or conversation, we must consciously
cleanse it of the imprints of centuries of inequality.

The table of contents and references are incomplete due to not having access to the works in their
original language.

Lili Nagy
Unversity of Theater and Film
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film directing 6x7

2019.