All language is political.
Hello and happy Halloween!
Not a whole lot on the news or updates front this month. The thing I mentioned last time is still without a contract, though it’s like 95% confirmed, so I’m not going to talk about it in public yet.
I needed a break from the city life (and honestly a short vacation), so I took a spontaneous trip to the sea last week. I went to a tiny town called Ueckermünde on the Stettin Lagoon, which is separated from the Baltic Sea by the barrier island Usedom. From the name, you’ve probably guessed that it’s also close to Poland. It’s the same town I went to for my birthday in 2022, and this time I just went up to the beach and looked at the water. It was cool and windy, around 50 F/9 C, but sunny and nearly cloudless. Probably the last really nice weekend until April, really. And, of course, it’s not beach season in October, so there weren’t a ton of people there (nice), but most things were closed (also because it was Sunday in Germany).
I walked along the water’s edge, sat on a pier, walked in a little garden (where there’s some minigolf?!), walked a bit more, and had some nice Kaffee und Kuchen on a patio where I could almost see the water (the sand and dunes were a little in the way). It was just what I needed. I decided Saturday afternoon that I’d hop on a train Sunday morning and get one back that evening. I needed to change trains twice (and on the way there, we had enough of a delay that I’d miss my connection, but I asked the conductor and she radioed in, so the train waited for us. Bless.), and the only option is the regional train that stops all the time, but that means I could just sit and read or play my silly phone games or what have you. (I’m working on Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, and it’s very weird.)
Which, actually, lets me segue a bit into the topic I want to talk about today: how language is political. This is a topic I’ve written about a few times already, or discussed in other posts, like southern Shakespeare, untranslatable words, or the two-parter on language, accents, and dialect, but recent political events in Germany crossed my tumblr dash, and I was inspired.
All language is political
I am by no means an expert in Sri Lankan history or culture, but Chandrasekera takes a page or two (I’m reading the ebook) to discuss how having the wrong kind of name, one that ends with N, means someone is more likely to be detained at a checkpoint, and having the right kind of name, that doesn’t have an N, like the narrator, means they’re the right kind of person, so they can go through. Names and naming practices are part of language and culture, and they were used in this instance as political tools.
We’ve all (probably) heard the slogan “the personal is political,” and language is a tool that can be used for both personal and political expression. Activists choosing to use one variety of their language over another, writers choosing to write in their own variety of a language (like Zora Neale Hurston), and anyone choosing to use a particular word instead of a different one is making a political decision (and also a personal one, because the personal is political.)
Gender-inclusive language
In English, we don’t have (much) grammatical gender, and we don’t mandatorily gender (all) occupations, so we have teacher and doctor and astronaut, but also actress and waitress and stewardess. Since the 1970s, feminist activism has gotten stewardess replaced with flight attendant and waitress/waiter with server, and many actors (female) prefer to call themselves actors instead of actresses. In this handful of occupational terms with gendering, you can see there’s a bit of prestige involved. Female-coded jobs are less valued, but there’s nothing inherently feminine about waiting tables or serving drinks on a plane, right? So getting rid of this coding is a step toward equality. At least that’s the goal behind it.
In German, however, we do have grammatical gender, and we do mandatorily gender all occupations, so we have Lehrer and Lehrerin, Arzt and Ärztin, Astronaut and Astronautin. But, the argument goes, using the “plain” masculine form, the so-called “generic masculine,” also includes nonmasculine people, so you can just say “Lehrer” (which can also be plural, vs. Lehrerinnen) and that means women, too.
Two studies I read in grad school looked at the effect of the “generic” masculine and whether it was actually inclusive. Signs point to no. The older one (2001), only available in German, though the abstract is also in English, consistently found “a lower visibility of women” when using the generic masculine compared to two alternative gender-inclusive forms. The newer one (2015) found, among other things, that school-aged girls were more likely to see themselves in stereotypically male professions (like scientist), which they often also considered to be more difficult professions, if these professions were presented as paired forms, e.g., “Astronauten und Astronautinnen.”
The discussion of how to be more gender inclusive with speech (and more recently, this covers how to include nonbinary individuals, but that hasn’t fully reached the mainstream discussion yet) goes back quite some time, and there have been a variety of things used. Here is a nice summary of the history of gender-inclusive speech in German (up to about 2015), which I won’t reproduce.
The oldest variant is the paired form, which appears in a letter I got from my internet provider, “Liebe Mitbewohnerinnen und Mitbewohner” (Dear residents (f/m)), or “Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,” which is the standard business letter opening (Dear sir or madam, but literally “Very honored ladies and gentlemen”). There’s no particular rule about starting with the feminine or masculine form, so it’s up to the writer.
There are a couple other ways of signaling it that are in use. There’s the “Binnen-I” (internal I), as in “LehrerInnen,” which was pretty popular for a while, but it’s not quite as noticeable as it could be. So some people started using the “Gendersternchen” (gender asterisk) as in “Lehrer*innen,” with variants “Lehrer_innen” and the more screen-reader-friendly “Lehrer:innen.” There’s also wholesale word replacement, like “Lehrkraft” (teaching staff), and grammatical tricks like “Lehrende” (the gerundive form; “teaching person/people”). Which one a person uses is up to them (or the style guide of their publication).
The backlash
So, naturally, the conservative politicians in the CDU/CSU hate this sort of thing, and various CDU/CSU politicians rail against “gendering” and have introduced measures to ban it. The state of Bavaria banned its use in public schools last year. In discourse, they call using gender-inclusive speech “gendering,” which is a misnomer. As noted above, and as anyone with critical thinking skills can deduce, both Lehrer and Lehrerin are already gendered terms, so it’s only “gendering” to include the feminine form … because the masculine one is neutral, generic, and inclusive. (Which, I hope, we have already established is not the case.) The majority of articles on the topic I can find in a hasty search are in German, though DW most likely has more.
Enter Lars Keitel (Green Party), who tumblr user doomdoomofdoom called the “funniest motherfucker alive”
The volunteer fire departments in the town of Friedrichsdorf, Hesse, have in their bylaws and ordinances the paired forms, e.g., “der Inspektor/die Inspektorin.” The local CDU faction wanted to “simplify” the language of the documents by adding the sentence “The designations of people laid forth in this statute include all gender forms.”
The motion passed, so the mayor, Lars Keitel, was bound by law to make the changes. So he removed all the masculine forms, and now every time a gendered occupational noun is stated, it’s the feminine one. He stated that he did this because “we want to live in equality” and added, “If this formulation is seen as a provocation, then we have a long way to go in Germany.”
The CDU, of course, said that this wasn’t the intention of their motion, and it “sends the wrong signal” because not all of the listed positions are currently filled by women. [looks at the speaker like I’m on The Office] Also, I should note, the regional head of the CDU is a woman, Katja Gehrmann.
I hope you enjoyed that.
I’ll close with a picture from my spontaneous vacation last weekend.
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