“Feminist philosophers and linguists have shown that women are marked. Marking draws attention to the woman’s femaleness and carries implications of inferiority. The woman is present, but only lesser. Marking is achieved by pronouns, prefixes and sex-specific words and naming practices. Practices of marking women as diminutive, secondary, or amateur serve to diminish us, particularly when such marking fits into a systemic cultural pattern of women’s trivialization.

Secondly, women are erased as subjects. Discursive practices set women up as outsiders, as objects in texts, but not straight-forwardly as speaking subjects.”