Some of the most careful elaborations of the impact of linguistic figuration on mass harm are feminist works. These stress misrepresentation and obfuscation via prevailing expressions for gendered harming and harm victims. They also show that societal relations of power enable certain discourses to achieve hegemony and thereupon solidify those relations of power. For example, Beneke (1982) undertook a study of rape-enabling metaphors that reaffirms Burt’s (1980) study of rape myths, discussed previously, but attends more closely to discourse. What Beneke (1982) calls rape language, discerned through interviews with men, includes the following metaphors:
• Sex is achievement.
• Sex is a commodity.
• Sex is possession.
• Sex is madness.
• Women are objects.
• A woman’s appearance is a weapon.
• Rape is theft of a valued commodity.
• Rape is instruction.
These metaphors have impactful variants, such as sex is a particular kind of achievement like a game or a war.
Planning for harm is likewise configured through gendered metaphors. Cohn (1987) describes metaphors in use that link nuclear planning to sexuality (e.g., a weapon producing “an orgasmic whump”); virginity (e.g., a bomb “losing her virginity”); domesticity (e.g., “weapons systems can ‘marry up’”) and prosocial interaction more generally (e.g., “pat a B-1”), birth (e.g., “It’s a boy”); and godliness (e.g., “the nuclear priesthood”). Cohn (1987) summarizes:
Language that is abstract, sanitized, full of euphemisms; language that is sexy and fun to use; paradigms whose referent is weapons; imagery that domesticates and deflates the forces of mass destruction; imagery that reverses sentient and nonsentient matter, that conflates birth and death, destruction and creation—all of these are part of what makes it possible to be radically removed from the reality of what one is talking about and from the realities one is creating through the discourse. Learning to speak the language reveals something about how thinking can become more abstract, more focused on parts disembedded from their context, more attentive to the survival of weapons than the survival of human beings. (p. 715; emphasis in original)
Language demarcates thought and speech, disallowing “certain questions to be asked or certain values to be expressed” (Cohn 1987, p. 708) and thus governing what can be contemplated and debated. The language of defense planning, Cohn discovered, precludes a holistic perspective on what people are truly up to: “The problem . . . is not only that the language is narrow but also that it is seen by its speakers as complete or whole unto itself—as representing a body of truths that exist independently of any other truth or knowledge” (p. 712). The “technostrategic discourse” Cohn was privy to acts “as an ideological curtain behind which the actual reasons for these (nuclear weapons development and deployment) decisions hide. . . . rather than informing and shaping decisions, it far more often functions as a legitimation for political outcomes that have occurred for utterly different reasons” (p. 716). The discourse obscures reality.
Similarly, in The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams (1990) emphasizes wording and the concealment it effects. She juxtaposes violence against nonhumans with violence against women in order to demonstrate that “patriarchal culture authorizes the eating of animals” (p. 13). She points out ways in which the oppression of women and nonhuman animals is conjointly accomplished, and feminist vegetarian resistance defused, through discourse. First, the experience, even the beingness, of nonhuman animals and women goes missing in the mainstream language of patriarchal societies (p. 40): “Just as dead bodies are absent from our language about meat, in descriptions of cultural violence women are also often the absent referent. Rape, in particular, carries such potent imagery that the term is transferred from the literal experience of women and applied metaphorically to other instances of violent devastation, such as the ‘rape’ of the earth in ecological writings of the early 1970s” (pp. 42–43). As such, language distances us from the “literal facts” (p. 75) of experiences of violence. Second, the relatedness of male to female and human to nonhuman is denied through various discursive means—by representing “man” as the universal human, using “animal” for nonhuman animal and thus denying that humans are animals as well, using the degendered “it” for nonhumans, and using metaphors that regularize violence toward nonhumans (e.g., “beating a dead horse”) (pp. 64–65). Third, animal bodies that are killed for meat are largely female or feminized bodies: “We oppress animals by associating them with women’s lesser status” (p. 72). Fourth, women and nonhumans are assigned to one of two mutually exclusive subject positions: “good or evil, emblems of divine perfection or diabolical incarnations, Mary or Eve, pet or beast” (p. 74). Adams refers to such classification in binary moral terms as “false naming” (p. 74). Overall, Adams exposes untruths about nonhuman animals and women, the telling of which linguistic representations facilitate.
Arran Stibbe (2001) covers some of the same ground as Adams, undertaking a critical discourse analysis of the syntaxes, idioms, metaphors, and other features of the language disseminated by meat industries concerning nonhuman animals and their treatment. For example, nonhuman animals are referred to in volume rather than count terms, thus erasing their individuality. Metaphors treat animals (e.g., breeding sows) as machinery and other things “to encourage the disregard of animal suffering” (Stibbe 2001, p. 156). Notably, Stibbe’s data are drawn from professional journals and industry publications, which have the reputation of conveying facts literally.
Generally speaking, figurativeness functions as a kind of subterfuge in the foregoing studies. The focus on language for deception hones a view of language as shaping perception to the exclusion of emotion. However, language shapes not just how we think but also what we feel. Further, the focus on language for deception implies strategy. It should be remembered, though, that bad faith is not a necessary aspect of the power of language to shape our view of things.6 No one need intend to manipulate or conceal.
The issue of manipulation brings us to ideology and propaganda, which lack the concreteness of ideas and wording (as well as narrative). They are essentially hybrid forms. Propaganda pertains to discourse but is centrally a matter of manipulating beliefs. Stanley (2015) defines political propaganda as “a kind of speech that fundamentally involves political, economic, aesthetic, or rational ideals, mobilized for a political purpose” (p. 52). The form that propaganda may take is open. Ideology is even less tangible. Eagleton (1991) points out that ideology has numerous definitions, including ones that are politics-neutral, such as “action-oriented sets of beliefs” (p. 2); ones that are less neutral, such as “the forms of thought motivated by social interests” (p. 1); and ones that highlight discourse over belief, such as “the points where power impacts upon certain utterances and inscribes itself tacitly within them” (p. 223). We can call ideas, wording, or narratives ideological if they construct or maintain hierarchies and harms. And we can think about the impact of propaganda or ideology that is structured narratively.
Narrative
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