IN-VISIBILE
n°00
The shapes of the words.
Ambiguities of gender language.
Man is the parameter, around which the entire linguistic universe revolves and is organised. Paradigmatic example: the same word man, in Italian, has a double valence, because it can refer both to the male of the species, and to the species itself, placing the woman in a subordinate condition to him.
Alma Sabatini
Sexism in the Italian Language, 1986
Language determines not only how we talk about the world, but also what we know of it.
Words represent the universe of our knowledge, they educate the thoughts of those who use it and often convey stereotypes so deeply rooted as to be INVISIBLE.
In language lurks a form of power, of sexism, of ideology: that is why it is necessary to dismantle the text and examine its structures and superstructures.
Tomaso Binga 1976
Alighiero Boetti, Emmeielle, 1971
Alighiero Boetti, Order and Disorder, 1973
Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency 1970
Rebecca Horn, Unicorn, 1944
Lola Dupre, Surreal collage 2010
In the Italian language, some words more than others, conceal their nature.
It often happens that we do not pay attention to the comparison between terms that in the masculine have a certain meaning and in the feminine another, reductive and ghettoising.
The same change occurs in other languages, in other cultures, such as English, Hebrew, Spanish, French... etc.