ABSTRACT
Talking about experience is a fundamental human activity and language is the medium of telling along with tone, gesture and other non-linguistic forms of expression. Telling is also a process of storying experience and in particular contexts of speaking, some stories are more easily told and heard than others. Talking and listening, for women of the late 1980s, were complicated by a problem, which was labeled as linguistic incongruence. Drawing upon the early feminist insight that language reflects male experiences such that its categories are often incongruent with women's lives, this feature of language produces problems of expression in the articulation of experiences that are incompletely acknowledged. The critiques and contributions of scholars with varied, multiple backgrounds and identities made clear that one could not count on an automatic gender solidarity in woman-to-woman interviewing. Feminist linguistic innovation provides impressive examples of activist creativity and the power of collective self-definition.
