Genevieve Vaughan

Genevieve Vaughan (born November 21, 1939) is an American expatriate semiotician, peace activist, feminist, and philanthropist, whose ideas and work have been influential in the intellectual movements around the Gift Economy and Matriarchal Studies. Her support also contributed heavily to the development of the global women’s movement.

Vaughan was born and grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas. During her childhood, her family became wealthy through oil, and she developed a consciousness of the great disparity of wealth between her family and others’. She completed a B.A. in English from Bryn Mawr College in 1961, and subsequently enrolled as a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin. There she met Italian philosopher Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1921–1985), whom she married in 1963, moving with him to Italy. They had three daughters together, and eventually divorced, in 1978.

Rossi-Landi is credited as a founder of the SocioSemiotics movement, which stresses the “sociality” of sign use. In 1964, he was asked to help start a new philosophical journal applying Marx’s analysis of the commodity and money to language. Vaughan writes that while the journal did not materialize, her husband wrote several books about this topic, and she found herself in disagreement with his framing of language as a form of exchange. Her own experience as a mother of small children who were learning to talk suggested that language is a form of gift-giving. Alongside Rossi-Landi, Vaughan attended the first meeting of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in Milan in 1974. She began her own research and in 1977 completed two essays, “Saussure and Vigotsky via Marx,” and “Communication and Exchange” In the latter, she introduces the ideas of “communicative need,” exchange as an aberrant form of communication, and money as a one-word language.

1978 was a watershed year for Vaughan. She divorced, entered psychoanalysis, and began to attend a feminist consciousness-raising group in Rome. Many of the women in the group worked at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and the group became a connection point for women from around the world to discuss important issues about women and development, environment, and peace.

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