Floating signifier
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Floating signifiers are signifiers without referents, such as a word that doesn't point to any actual object. Claude Lévi-Strauss originated this term. The notion of floating signifiers is used in some more textual forms of postmodernism. It can be applied to concepts such as race and gender, as a way of asserting that the word is more concrete than the concept it describes, where the concept may not be stable, but the word is.
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