Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, p. 21: Language is the place where actual and possible forms of social organization and their likely social and political consequences are defined and contested. Yet it is also the place where our sense of ourselves, our subjectivity, is constructed. The assumption that subjectivity is constructed implies that it is not innate, not genetically determined, but socially produced. Subjectivity is produced in a whole range of discursive practices --economic, social, and political-- the meanings of which are a constant site of struggle over power. Language is not the expression of unique individuality; it constructs the individual's subjectivity in ways which are socially specific.... subjectivity is neither unified nor fixed. Unlike humanism, which implies a conscious, knowing, unified, rational subject [postmodernism] theorizes subjectivity as a site of disunity and conflict, central to the process of political change and to preserving the status quo.

Stanley Aronwitz and Henry A. Giroux, Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture and Social Criticism, pp. 92-93: The appeal to language cannot justify a universal or absolute claim to either truth or meaning. Language does not have a fixed and unchanging correspondence to reality; on the contrary, as Catherine Belsey points out, it is constituted "through a system of signs which signify by means of their relationship to each other.... Meaning is public and conventional, the result not of individual intention but of inter-individual intelligibility. In other word, meaning is socially constructed, and the social construction of the signifying system is intimately related, therefore, to the social formation itself" [Belsey, Critical Practice, 42,46].

See also Culture, and Ideology