How to Tame a Wild Tongue

The title “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” inserts Anzaldúa into conversation with other writers affiliated with French feminist theory. Writers like Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray have written extensively on the topic of women and language, exploring the challenges that women face in overcoming the culture of silence that patriarchy enforces.

This branch of feminist theory engages with Jacques Lacan’s interpretations of Sigmund Freud from a feminist perspective. French feminist thinkers tend to distinguish the masculine and feminine, defining masculine as the discourse of language and philosophy, and feminine as that which is beyond language—the nonlinguistic, bodily, intuitive, and untamed.

Anzaldúa explicitly joins this conversation when she asserts that “[l]anguage is a male discourse” (35). She distinguishes herself from these French theorists, however, by defining the “wild tongue” as a “mother tongue.” She concludes the first paragraph with the sentence, “My mouth is a motherlode” (33), illustrating the connection between language and gender. Her emphasis on the sensuality, folk traditions, and counterculture of her people illustrates how Anzaldúa comes to understand her “mother tongue” as a language that writes and speaks against the predominant patriarchal discourse. She views her native language as a feminine language.