“Water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it”

Water as a feminist metaphor

Abstract

This article analyses how the metaphorical association between women and water has been used to control and exploit women and how this metaphorical connection has been reclaimed by feminists in order to resist control and, more radically, to shape how the general public conceptualise water itself and our relationship to it. My corpus is a collection of five feminist and/or queer works of literature, united by their use of metaphors of water in relation to women and/or feminism and which I analyse using feminist theory and critical metaphor analysis. The results show that the majority of the metaphors analysed are based on the conceptual metaphor a woman is water, which in turn are directly or indirectly based on a container image schema. Sexist metaphors seek to contain women, in order to exploit them, whereas feminist metaphors highlight resisting containment. Underlying all of the metaphors in this paper is the idea of the immense power of water and its fundamental nature as a fluid, shape-shifting entity.