ABSTRACT
Feminist criticism with a poststructuralist perspective, as outlined by Chris Weedon (1987), takes language as the site of the cultural production of gender identity: subjectivity is discursively constituted. An individual’s identity is constructed at every moment through subject positions. These positions are taken up by the language user in the enactment of discourse practices and are constantly shifting. From this view of subjectivity as a process, it is evident that a person’s sense of identity is an “effect of discourse,” which is therefore changeable: “A poststructuralist position on subjectivity and consciousness relativizes the individual’s sense of herself by making it an effect of discourse which is open to continuous redefinition and which is constantly slipping” (Weedon 1987:106).
