system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Where did the concept of "words as violence" originate from?

I can't seem to find where this idea originated. And besides it being a discoursive way of thinking - is there any hard science that justifies equating the spoken word with (physical) violence?
gpt
The notion that words--or more properly discourse--cause violence   gained steam with the post-structuralist philosophies of Foucault, Derrida, and so forth. Foucault, for instance, wanted to demonstrate the categories, classifications, and system of discipline (see both *The Order of Things* and *Discipline and Punish* in particular) had material effects on bodies. The point being that classifications and so forth aren't neutral systems but productive of the world we live in. When some bodies/subjectivities fall outside of the dominant classifications, then they become classified as delinquent, insane, or otherwise undesirable and, thus, in need of correction or punishment.

Judith Butler did a great deal of work incorporating these insights into feminist theory. Her point is that hetero-normative and gender-normative systems of discourse and classification do violence to identities that fall outside of those frameworks by both authorizing attempts to 'normalize' and to punish those that refuse to change to the established norm as well as causing mental anguish to those that fall outside the norm. 

So the prevalence of discourse that constantly position, for instance, queer identities as immoral, illogical, and/or correctable does violence to the bodies of queer people because it both authorizes physical attacks on those people as well as causes mental pain and anguish.