"gender neutral pronouns"

[Matthew Herrington]

Apropos of gendered pronouns, McCain used "she" to refer to the U.S.
Andrew Sullivan had this to say:

11.02 pm. I love the use of the feminine pronoun for a country. Very
traditional and always moving. But it does age him. He seems elegiac
to me right now, almost wistful.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/

Matt Herrington



On 9/4/08, William Ryan <wfr at sas.ac.uk> wrote:
> Languages develop in all sorts of ways which cannot  necessarily be
> predicted or controlled. Deliberate attempts to modify them, whether by
> Communists, Nationalists, the Academie Francaise, gender warriors, or any
> other kind of would-be social engineers, rarely have the success that was
> hoped for them. The notion of gender-neutral language can only be meaningful
> in languages which do not have grammatical gender, or effectively restrict
> it largely to pronouns as in English. Why do we English speakers have to
> agonize over this when speakers of most other European languages do not?
> Does a Russian female judge regard herself as oppressed because sud'ia,
> despite appearances, is a masculine noun; does a German Fraulein regard
> herself as being belittled because she is grammatically neuter (while her
> Swiss cousin is feminine)? (Against this I have to say that several Russians
> at various times have expressed surprise to me that babies in English are
> often referred to as 'it' - and this despite the Russian neuter 'ditya'.)
> There is an extensive specialist literature on this, but I cannot see that a
> desire for gender-neutral usage in English, which seems to have arisen
> originally from the desire to avoid the ambiguity caused by using ostensibly
> masculine forms as the inclusive form, rather than as a feminist issue,
> should exclude treating countries or ships as feminine. Why look for gender
> slights were there are none, and where there is no ambiguity?
>
>  If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary you will find that 'she'
> historically has had a whole range of referents, most of which cannot be
> seen to have pejorative overtones: all female animals, some animals or birds
> of either sex if male is not specifically intended (e.g. cat), ship, boat,
> carriage, train, gun, kettle, the Church, a city, individual states of the
> USA, the Moon ('Softly, silently, now the moon / walks the night in her
> silver shoon'). In dialect, and colloquial Australian and New Zealand
> English, 'she' can have much wider usage. I do not know why some of these
> words appear to be feminine, although some may have inherited this from
> Latin - country, continent and some regional names tend to have latinate
> forms ending in -a, which suggests that this really is a survival of
> grammatical gender and not 'gendered emphasis'.
>
>  There are many English words where the default (unmarked) form implies, or
> may be thought to imply, a male (e.g. fireman, policeman) and is where its
> use could be seen either as making a condescending assumption or as
> factually inaccurate in the modern world, and most people have adjusted
> their usage accordingly. But the use of 'she' for a country or a ship ('God
> bless all who sail in her' - imagine saying 'it' in that context) carries no
> such implications. For a publisher to insist, without the author's
> permission, on changing 'her' to 'it' in such a context, even if 'it' is
> also common usage, is ignorant and a form of censorship.
>
>  Will Ryan
>
>
>  Francoise Rosset wrote:
>
> > I would be he fourth non-anglophone to address a question about
> > English usage. Good thing Claire and William stepped in.
> >
> >
> > > Gender-inclusive or gender-neutral language has to (or should have to)
> do with avoiding or minimizing the emphasis on the gender of a human being
> or group of human beings.
> > >
> >
> > Well said, but that's not all. As Claire pointed out, it is also about
> > removing gendered emphasis where it should NOT be, i.e. when dealing
> > with objects. We do not refer to Congress as "he" or the Supreme Court
> > or parliament as "she." In my opinion, if institutions fall into that
> > category, so do countries.
> >
> > Yes, there is a long tradition of calling Russia and other countries
> "she."
> > Is tradition right or immutable per se?
> >
> > Perhaps the language itself determines a gender for the name of the
> country, as in Russian, French (French has the excuse that if only offers
> male/female). It seems that grammatical gender was extended to invest the
> name of the country with an entire gendered persona.
> >
> > Why should a country be a woman? Do we have a she reason? Because it takes
> strong men to run "her"? Ick.
> >
> > I too welcome the effort to make language more gender-neutral, since I
> firmly believe that language encodes (and affects) culture. Sometimes those
> efforts result in weird formulations. This is not one of them, at least not
> to my non-anglophone ears.
> >
> > That said, they are Robert Chandler's words: he is entitled to his
> > preferences, and I appreciate his careful, thoughtful phrasing of a
> > legitimate question.
> > -FR
> >
> > Francoise Rosset, Associate Professor
> > Chair, Russian and Russian Studies
> > Coordinator, German and Russian
> > Wheaton College
> > Norton, Massachusetts 02766
> > Office: (508) 285-3696
> > FAX:   (508) 286-3640
> >
> >
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-- 
Matthew Wilson Herrington
Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
12 Quincy St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
mherring at fas.harvard.edu

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