Editorial
1 Addressing the diverse field of gender and language, the current issue of gender forum brings together articles from a wide range of disciplines. Thus this issue presents contributions investigating the role of language in relation to gender in literature by East German women writers, the language philosophy of Stanley Cavell, linguistic codes employed in gay personal ads in Taiwan, as well as the nexus of language, gender, and history in selected works by Gertrude Stein.
2 Drawing on Peirce's concept of iconicity, Anne Lequy's contribution, "Iconicity as a Doorway to a New Space: Lesser Known East German Writers in the Seventies and Eighties," looks beyond the work of well-known authors such as Christa Wolf to shed light on the use of language in works by eight less known GDR women writers. In her discussion, Lequy shows how imagic, diagrammatic, and metaphoric iconicity subvert patriarchal as well as totalitarian structures in these texts. However, Lequy also cautions us to not simply equate iconicity with subversion in that such an equation would necessarily blind us, among others, to how literary iconicity enables these authors to free themselves at least momentarily from their "squinting gaze" (schielender Blick), thus enabling them to work creatively from within the space carved out by male aesthetic norms.
3 In discussing the importance of gender in Stanley Cavell's writing on language and on film, Ludger Viefhues-Bailey's "Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell" addresses a silence in the critical study of Cavell's work, whose concern with gender issues has rarely become the subject of critical and systematic analysis. Positioning Cavell in relation (as well as contrast) to Wittgenstein's language of philosophy, Viefhues-Bailey goes on to shed light on the intricate relation established between gender and ways of speaking and knowing, between language and (male) desire in Cavell's work, illustrating how skepticism and other ways of knowing come to be perceived as a specifically "male affair." By reading Cavell's work on language together with his work on film (Hollywood melodrama in particular), Viefhues-Bailey critically examines Cavell's claim that these films subvert male ways of knowing, allowing female stars to evade a model of desire based on objectification and replacing it with one based on participation.
4 Hong-Chi Shiau's contribution, "Performativity, Intertextuality and Social Change: An Ethnographic Analysis of Taiwanese Gay Personal Ads" investigates linguistic codes used by Taiwanese gay men in personal ads before and after the rise of the Internet. Analysing and comparing the linguistic codes employed in these ads, Shiau reads them as interactive performances enabling the construction of homosexual identities and opening up a site where social and cultural norms can be contested and subverted.
5 Bringing together the issues of gender, language, and history, in her reading of Gertrude Stein's Messages from History and "We Came. A History," in her contribution, "Are Remarks History? Gertrude Stein as Conceptual Artist," Linda S. Watts discusses Stein as a forerunner and founding figure of language-based conceptual art. Describing Stein's use of and play with language as an "aesthetics of interruption," Watts illustrates the extent to which Stein used this technique to question and destabilize male-centered versions of art and history, and traces the repercussion of this technique in the work of contemporary conceptual/word artists such as Barbara Kruger and the Guerilla Girls.