ABSTRACT
Winston Smith, in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old articles and news stories in The Times, the Party paper in Oceania. He is fluent in both Oldspeak and Newspeak, moving easily between the two as he refashions texts. A relationship between gender and language is established: Julia does not produce texts or control language, but rather mixes images 'on the kaleidoscopes', and the 'speakwrite' which Winston uses is, by comparison, a sign of relative linguistic empowerment. This chapter examines feminist fictional and theoretical calls for a specifically gendered, feminine 'speakwrite' or right to speak, to counter cultural silencing or marginalisation of women's voices. Margaret Whitford suggests that rather than critiquing Irigaray's texts as depoliticised and anti-materialist, we can read her work as one of the many Utopian voices within feminism; not as far as we might think from, for example, materialist critiques.
