Contenu du sommaire : Genres culturels et interculturels, sous la direction de Luce Irigaray

Taking as a point of departure the differences already discussed in J'aime à toi (Grasset 1992) between what little girls and little boys say to their mothers, this study sketches out the evolution of the capacity for intersubjectivity in male and female adolescents, and in adult men and women of various ages, based on their respective responses to cues directing them to produce a sentence using the preposition avec (with), or the adverb ensemble (together), or establishing a relationship between certain cue words including two pronouns or a possessive adjective. It would appear that female respondents try to establish a dialogic relation, especially with the other sex, while male respondents privilege the relation to the object, material or spiritual, or a less differentiated relation to another man or other men. Awareness of belonging to one's own gender could serve as a means to opening a dialogue between women and men.

Groups of men and women give very different answers to the cue directing them to disambiguate the phrase elle(s) s'aime(nt) (she loves herself/they [f.] love themselves/each other). Men rarely imagine that women can love themselves for reasons other than those linked to their appearance. Women, on the contrary, talk more about esteem and friendship, and condemn the narcissistic love of self. Communication between the sexes demands that these misunderstandings be corrected through the recognition of differences.

Apart from delirium and from the absence of denial, male and female schizophrenics use the same discourse as so-called normal subjects regarding sexed relations. Semiotic analysis reveals a feminine desire-to-be-with-the-other and a masculine power-to-have-the-other, both failures. The expression in language of belonging to one's gender could open the way to new nosological interpretations, and indeed to new therapeutic methods.

Analysis of responses in Italian to instructions to make a sentence with one of the following words : celibato (celibate), vergine (virgin), divinità (divinity), or to give the definition of the words dio (god) or dea (goddess) confirms that male respondents choose themselves as the subject of discourse at the expense of feminine subjects, and that they privilege terms which represent their own sex. Women avoid defining themselves as subjects and privilege male or neuter subjects, even when the cue induces a feminine subject or a representation of the feminine gender.

Analysis of responses to a cue requiring completion of sentences ending with nouns modified by possessive adjectives indicates that American women repondents represented sexed subjectivity more often than American men respondents through subject/object relations— i.e. through use of the possessive adjective— rather than through appropriation of a gendered grammatical subject.

In American English responses to the cue, « Make a simple sentence using the words "mother-daughter" », demonstrated that the mother-daughter relation, while still powerful and most often positively valorized by both men and women respondents, has been deeply affected by patriarchy. The daughter emerges as passive object to be acted upon by others, notably by her own mother. The re-establishment of the female genealogical line would require, among other things, a more active, subjective role for the daughter.

The responses obtained in Canadian English to a cue that plays on synonymy confirm the differences between the linguictic choices or habits of male and female subjects, notably those analyzed in Sexes et genres à travers les langues. Certain divergent findings in relation to previous work on this subject seem to be due to the nature of the male test group (students at a military school) or to the context of the administering of the test (just after the Gulf War). An « ancillary » analysis was done and proposals for a larger study have been made.

The same cues--« Make a sentence using the word parenté/relations and sexualité/sexuality-- were proposed to a mixed group of bilingual Canadian subjects. Apart from the differences noted between the responses of the women and the men, differences between the responses obtained in French and in English are considered. Certain methodological questions are raised with an expanded study in mind.

The empirical research done in German allows us to observe the emergence of a positive structure of the female sex (self-reflection, assertion of sexual difference, importance of the relation to the other, female genealogy) and to what extent the male sex, with his own problematics, respects this structure.

Are there any differences in the language and the images with wich women and men express their specific experiences, dreams and fantasies about the other sex, differences that allow us to distinguish specific female and male discourses ? In order to answer this question we present three essays that analyse statements of women and men on a syntactic, semiotic and semantic level.