LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES BETWEEN INVENTIONS AND AFFECTS

A FEMINIST CONTRIBUTION

Abstract

his article is a theoretical contribution inspired by feminist approaches to the field of language ideologies, brought on by the metadiscursive disputes surrounding gender uses in Brazilian Portuguese. Through a critical reflection about the conceptualization of the term in the literature, this work proposes the inclusion of two dimensions usually forgotten in the debate: the inventive and the affective. The discussion focuses on how language ideologies operate based on beliefs about how language works or should work, but are constructed as representations linked to ontological regimes of referential truth. Thinking about the ideological functioning of language from the perspectives of invention (Wagner, 2012) and affect (Ahmed, 2014) as theoretical tools and practices of social action carried out by feminist studies makes it possible to understand in greater depth the (meta)pragmatic presuppositions and entailments (Silverstein, 2003) present in the production of a politics of signs which aligns certain speaking bodies with each other, excluding others from the normative matrix of meanings, legitimizing and settling projects of hierarchization and exclusion.