How to Do Things While Saying Nothing: Illocutionary Dissimulation in Milkman

Abstract: Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby apply J.L. Austin to understand women's systemic disempowerment from performing ordinary speech acts. They argue that speakers are silenced on an illocutionary level when their intended speech acts go unrecognized, yet some speakers counterintuitively exert power by camouflaging their intentions. This phenomenon, which I call illocutionary dissimulation, is both illustrated in the plot of Anna Burns's Milkman and theorized through the novel's style. Milkman reveals a previously unrecognized linguistic subterfuge that prevails in constrained communicative landscapes like 1970s Northern Ireland and formally models how disparate feminist accounts of language might unite to redress linguistic violence.