she as a gender-neutral pronoun

[Michael Newman]

I think somewhere I called that use of she "the affirmative action pronoun." I think some people didn't think that was very funny.

There are legitimate semantic reasons to prefer a singular pronoun in some contexts where the sex of the referent is logically sex-indefiite, in particular to create a more personal rhetorical effect. You can better imagine a personification of "a solitary reader" "the critic" etc. with a singular pronoun than with they However, in these cases, the writers are simply trying to not violate a ridiculous prescriptive rule. In doing so, they lose the ability to modulate between more generic and more individual interpretations.  Hopefully, that norm will go the way of the prohibition against sentential hopefully. 




Michael Newman
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Queens College/CUNY
michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu



On Jan 2, 2011, at 4:07 AM, Paul Frank wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Paul Frank <paulfrank at POST.HARVARD.EDU>
> Subject:      she as a gender-neutral pronoun
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Several years ago, I started noticing the use in academic prose of
> "she" as a gender-neutral pronoun to avoid the supposedly sexist "he"
> and the no-matter-how-much-descriptivists-say-it's-okay-somewhat-problematic
> "they." My unscientific impression is that this use of "she" is
> gradually becoming de rigueur in academic prose, at least in the
> humanities.
> 
> The New York Review of Books recently asked "six accomplished critics
> to explain what it is they do." Note their use of the pronoun "she":
> 
> Stephen Burn: A solitary reader, brooding over an obscure contemporary
> novel, or slowly puzzling out a page of “Finnegans Wake,” is suddenly
> not so solitary. Amid the network of networks there is always another
> reader, an improvised community into which she can merge and make
> visible her invented self.
> 
> Katie Roiphe: Now, maybe more than ever, in a cultural desert
> characterized by the vast, glimmering territory of the Internet, it is
> important for the critic to write gracefully. If she is going to
> separate excellent books from those merely posing as excellent, the
> brilliant from the flashy, the real talent from the hyped — if she is
> going to ferret out what is lazy and merely fashionable, if she is
> going to hold writers to the standards they have set for themselves in
> their best work, if she is going to be the ideal reader and in so
> doing prove that the ideal reader exists — then the critic has one
> important function: to write well.
> 
> Adam Kirsch: Of course, this is an ideal. Most of the time, depending
> on the kind of piece she is writing, the critic also has other
> responsibilities. She is a journalist: a review is, in part, a news
> story about a new book and why it matters. She is a consumer advocate,
> giving the reader enough information to decide whether to buy the
> book. At times — as we saw recently in the discussion of Jonathan
> Franzen’s “Freedom” — she is a social commentator, trying to determine
> what the success (or failure) of a particular book says about America
> at large, how the nation lives or thinks or imagines.
> 
> I know, "they" has been used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun
> since the 15th century if not before, but many writers still try to
> avoid this use of "they" and in some circles "she" now appears to be a
> standard gender-neutral pronoun, though even in academic prose it
> obviously still refers to women more often than to men.
> 
> It would be interesting to know in which disciplines this use of "she"
> is more prevalent. It's not surprising that it's common in lit-crit
> circles.
> 
> Paul
> 
> Paul Frank
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