University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Supervised Undergraduate Student Research Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects and Creative Work 12-1994 Speak My Language: An Analysis of Women's Use of Language in the Realm of Performance Art Rachel Elizabeth Pollock University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj Recommended Citation Pollock, Rachel Elizabeth, "Speak My Language: An Analysis of Women's Use of Language in the Realm of Performance Art" (1994). Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/44 This is brought to you for free and open access by the Supervised Undergraduate Student Research and Creative Work at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 1 Speak My Language: An Analysis of Women's Use of Language In the Realm of Performance Art Rachel E. Pollock Dr. Judy Lee Oliva December 14, 1994 2 In the fast-growing, relatively new genre of performance art, women are struggling with language as a mode of female expression. They experiment with the patriarchal structure and etymology of verbal communication, In some instances assimilating traditionally male speech patterns (e.g. cursing, scatology, explicit sexual references) and in others creating a syntax and vocabulary--a "language," if you will--of their own. The former category of artists, the "Revolutionary School," reject feminist linguistic theory and decline to express themselves through alternative structure and invented or redefined vocabulary.