The origin of sexism in language
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.31445Keywords:
sexist language, language ideologies, queer linguistics, grammatical genderAbstract
Although previous work on sexist linguistic structures has identified the causes of sexism in language as stemming from an androcentric world view, it has not described the social and semiotic processes involved in the historic production and reproduction of this kind of linguistic sexism. This article uses the three processes of iconisation, fractal recursivity, and erasure to bring together what appear to be disparate phenomena (such as the masculine generic, and even the very existence of the feminine grammatical gender) into a unifying theory. Iconisation results in the binary division of humanity into females and males; fractal recursivity explains how this division was projected onto language; and erasure demonstrates how certain discourses have been ignored, to the profit of others. A Queer critique of the two concepts of binarity and markedness (which arise as a result of iconisation) opens up exciting new ways to approach sexism in language, and to revitalise research in this area.
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Labrosse, C. (2002) Pour une langue française non sexiste. Montréal: Les Editions des Intouchables.
Lazar, M. (2014) Recuperating feminism, reclaiming femininity: hybrid postfeminism I-dentity in consumer advertisements. Gender and Language 8(2): 205–24. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v8i2.205
Le Monde. (2014) Un député sanctionné pour un ‘Mme LE président’. Le Monde (8 October). Retrieved from www.lemonde.fr/politique/video/2014/10/08/un-depute-sanctionne-pour-un-madame-le-president_4502359_823448.html.
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Luraghi, S. (2011) The origin of the Proto-Indo-European gender system: typological considerations. Folia Linguistica 45(2): 435–63. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.016
Lyons, J. (1977) Semantics (2 vols). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McConnell-Ginet, S. (1984) The origins of sexist language in discourse. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 433: 123–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1984.tb14764.x
McConnell-Ginet, S. (2002) ‘Queering’ semantics: definitional struggles. In K. Campbell-Kibler, R. Podesva J., S. Roberts J. and A. Wong (eds) Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice 137–60. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
McConnell-Ginet, S. (2014) Gender and its relation to sex: the myth of ‘natural’ gender. In G. G. Corbett (ed.) The Expression of Gender 3–38. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Michard, C. (1996) Genre et sexe en linguistique: les analyses du masculin générique. Mots, Les langages du politique 49: 29–47.
Milani, T. M. (2010) What’s in a name? Language ideology and social differentiation in a Swedish print-mediated debate. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14(1): 116–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2009.00435.x
Mills, S. (2008) Language and Sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511755033
Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (2012) Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and Standardization (4th edition). London, New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203124666
Motschenbacher, H. (2010) Language, Gender and Sexual Identity: Poststructuralist perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.29
Motschenbacher, H. (2014) Grammatical gender as a challenge for language policy: the (im)possibility of non-heteronormative language use in German versus English. Language Policy 13(3): 243–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-013-9300-0
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Published
2018-10-22
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Coady, A. (2018). The origin of sexism in language. Gender and Language, 12(3), 271-293. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.31445
