Ewen and Ewen’s very first paragraphs introduce the printer’s terminology of the term “stereotype” and discuss the gendered assumptions of the “patrix” and the “matrix,” specifically illuminating how, in the jargon of printers, the patrix, from the Latin for father, was the producer, and the matrix, from the later for mother, was the recipient. “Gender was used to communicate a hierarchy of importance,” Ewen and Ewen explain.
This example of the assumption of social inequality and the very language that enforces it appears to exemplify to me several of Moscovici’s arguments about how social representations both a) conventionalize objects and people and events as well as b) impose them on us. This gendered hierarchy of importance, and specifically of “origin” and “copy” (much like the Biblical story of how Eve was created from Adam’s rib) is built into the language of printing, and, as we see in both Ewen and Ewen’s work as well as Metaphor, hierarchies of social inequality are built into much language.
My greater point for discussion, then, is how can we explore Moscovici’s ideas, including the idea that people make things through communication, to explain how social hierarchies of gender and race are reinforced by non-purposeful (or metaphorical) aspects of language and representation?
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