An electronic dictionary that maps the feminist lexicon in Spanish through lexical relations, theoretical perspectives, and the genealogical history of each term. Research, open code, and academic rigour at the service of consultation and teaching.
FemiLex-Digital is a digital lexical reference tool designed to explore feminist vocabulary not as a flat list of words but as a living network of meaning relations. Each term connects to others through formal Lexical Functions, revealing conceptual antonyms, hypernyms, synonyms, and ideological solidarity relations that until now were only visible to specialists.
The project responds to a real need: most feminist concepts circulate in public debates without being formally documented, and many of them are actively disputed between different theoretical currents. FemiLex-Digital documents this diversity, makes the disputes explicit, and lets users navigate from a natural-language concept to the technical term that best expresses it.
The project is grounded in Igor Mel'čuk's Meaning-Text Theory, which proposes a formal system of Lexical Functions (LF) to describe with precision how word meanings relate to each other. Each LF is an applicable mathematical operation: given a term, it returns another that fulfils a specific semantic role. This allows treating the dictionary as a knowledge graph readable by humans and machines alike.
Terms with opposite meaning on the same semantic axis. E.g. patriarchy ↔ gender equality.
Terms with equivalent or very close meaning. E.g. machismo ≈ androcentrism.
Wider category that contains the term. E.g. machismo → patriarchy.
Extended LF specific to political-conceptual domains: terms that activate each other within an ideological network.
Beyond classical LFs (ANTI, SYN, HYPER, MAGN, OPER, REAL, BON, MAL), we introduce SOLIDIDEOL as a project-specific extension, designed to capture the political and conceptual relations that the original framework does not cover.
The initial corpus is built from a diverse set of academic and public-facing documentary sources from the Spanish-speaking domain of feminist studies, including contemporary works of terminological analysis, specialised glossaries, and reference works that have been reviewed and cross-checked for the construction of the corpus.
Each entry combines a rigorous minimal definition, an extended definition with theoretical context, semantic field and conceptual category labels, a documented genealogical history with bibliographic references, and all lexical relations connecting the term to others in the corpus.
FemiLex-Digital is a tool oriented to academic and educational use. The sources used are properly cited respecting each work's authorship rights. The use of definitional excerpts and bibliographic references falls under the principles of freedom of citation recognised by Costa Rican and international law, and never replaces consultation of the original works, which is actively encouraged.
FemiLex-Digital is built with open-source technologies, choosing at each layer the most adequate tool for representing and processing structured knowledge. The site is static where possible, dynamic where necessary, and designed to scale from a pilot corpus of dozens of terms to a full one of hundreds without rewrites.