Bringing Down The House: The Master's Tools, The Master's House.

Abstract

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" is the title of an article by Audre Lorde that argues that masculine tools cannot be used to fight sexism just as tools of racism, such as language, cannot be effectively used to fight against racial discrimination. A male dominated language system is not the best tool to dismantle patriarchal dominance. This is because in most linguistic and therefore cultural systems, men have arrogated themselves the office of masters. They use language to dominate women. It is therefore imperative, if women are to find true freedom, that language too is demasculinised. In this context, language is seen as an ineffective tool in the fight against sexism because it is, itself, sexist. Lorde probably had in mind the English language that constructs most positions of power in male terms. God for example is referred to as "He". Obviously this is not a paper aimed at determining God's sex, I will leave that to the theologians, but suffice it to say that this is not a problem we have in either my native Kikuyu language or Swahili. We do not have the masculine pronoun "he" nor the feminine "she" instead we use the gender neutral prefix "a" instead of the pronouns. In Genesis 1:27, for example, the Kiswahili bible describes the creation of man and woman in the following words: "Mungu akaumba mtu kwa mfano wake, kwa mfano wa mungu akawaumba, mwanamume na mwanamke aliwaumba". It is not possible to tell from the above quotation what sex God is. The bold "a" has replaced the english pronoun he and the "a" would have been the same prefix even if God wereto be read as female. In other words, nothing would have changed in any of the words were God to be seen as female