September 2020 - Bachelor’s degree project

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
Tomaso Binga, Reflections in installments, eleventh installment, November 1991
Alighiero Boetti, Emmeielle, 1971
Alighiero Boetti, Order and Disorder, 1973
Tamara de Lempicka, Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti 1929
Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency 1970
Louise Bourgeois, Spider Woman, 2004
Rebecca Horn, Unicorn, 1944
Lola Dupre, Surreal collage 2010


The images of the words

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.