ABSTRACT
Queer theory eventually introduced a radically novel claim that one should focus exclusively on gender conflict in order to reveal the oppression and exploitation of language itself over the body. Ideology is much more pervasive among speaking beings, and it has saturated their world in a much more insidious way. Language matters. Structuralist Marxists presumed that there were discrete locations of power that compelled individuals to act and think in ideologically driven ways. Karl Marx and Louis Althusser each believed that the ‘mode of production,’ situated as the ‘base,’ compelled and produced the ideological superstructure. Queer theory proposes, indeed presumes, that this script pre-exists the subject and that the subject is born into a world that compels him or her to accept the role already assigned. The body pre-exists absorption by cultural signs, existing only in a ‘dumb’ and unintelligible reality, and then gender, as a linguistic practice, inscribes itself upon the body.
