Loading...

Genderless Grammar

How to Promote Inclusivity without Destroying Languages

by Massimo Arcangeli (Author)
©2023 Monographs 110 Pages

Summary

Attempts to conceal grammatical gender, dictated by the "inclusive" desire to overcome the simple distinction between masculine and feminine (gender binarism) and make room for the neutral, affect the national languagesof a variety of Western countries with increasing frequency and intensity, with the risk of weakening or compromising the functioning of the languages’ supporting structures. A grammatical innovation has a very different impact from a neologism, and when that innovation, under the excuse of inclusion, ends up infiltrating a public act, or any other text issued or produced by a public entity, penetrating it in a pervasive way, the institutional endorsement should set off the alarm bells. In our case, simplicistically overlapping two levels that must instead be kept distinct – one "structural" (technical-linguistic) and the other "superstructural" (socio-cultural) – means that, in the growth economy of an entire community of speakers and writers, the structures of an idiom, above all if stratified over time, are bent to accommodate the desires of those who, against all logic and the most elementary common sense, expect immediate changes that would upset or crack the linguistic system. This ends up making even the simple decodingof information difficult.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of contents
  • The “dictatorship” of political correctness
  • Gender equality and inequality: From the “overextended” male to contemporary feminisms
  • In the name of the neutral: The schwa and other “transgender” graphic symbols
  • Inclusiveness in various languages: Requests, problems, solutions

←8 | 9→

The “dictatorship” of political correctness

A bit of history

In 2011, in the parallel universe of the Ultimate series, a new Spider Man was launched by Marvel Comics. Miles Morales, whose features are a mix of Afro-American and Hispanic, replaced Peter Parker, who died at the hands of the Green Goblin; he follows in the footsteps of another half-Hispanic in the role of the superhero, Miguel O’Hara, the protagonist of a series created in 1992 and set in the future (Spider-Man 2099). Meanwhile, Thor has become a woman, in a series that landed on the market in 2015 (taking on the role of the Goddess of Thunder, Jane Foster, his historical girlfriend), and that smoker, drinker and great fornicator who was Wolverine, the mutant of the X-Men sporting adamantium, no longer smokes, hardly ever touches liquor and – out of respect for the female gender – indulges much less often than before in sex. These are some harmless examples of a politically correct reworking, characterized, in the most striking cases, by an egalitarian extremism, a normalizing puritanism, and a sugarcoating uniformity that drive us to act retroactively, even altering the imagination of children and young people. In Italian reprints of old Walt Disney comics, references to the fishing hobby of Goofy and Mickey have disappeared, and in no. 47 (January 1997) of the magazine Comic Art, a reader, Daniele Danese, pointed out that in another re-edition of a Disney comic (published in 1974) it was specified that the beer drunk by Mickey Mouse was non-alcoholic even though in Italy, at the time the original came out, there was still no mention of non-alcoholic beer.

Political correctness was born in the 1930s in the United States, within a Communist Left-wing that was concerned with recording and analyzing the behavior of party members and militants, particularly regimented and misaligned people, with respect to the positions dictated by Stalinism. Assimilated in the 1960s by certain fringes of the New Left, it arrived in Italy on the wave of the 1968 protests; subsequently, it rapidly took hold and assumed larger and larger dimensions. The late 1980s was decisive: at this time, in some of the most prestigious North ←9 | 10→American universities, starting with that of Michigan (1988), precise regulations (speech codes) began to spread. The intent was to regulate the verbal behavior among the residents on the various campuses, applying administrative sanctions to anyone who indulged in racist, sexist or homophobic language.

In 1993, four jurists, Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, published the manifesto (Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the Frst Amendment) of the champions of political correctness. According to the four scholars, the First Amendment of the American Constitution, which protects freedom of worship, of the press and of speech and does not limit the right to meet and demonstrate, as long as it is peaceful, cannot (and must not) stand in the way of attempts to curb abusive expressions, detrimental to people’s dignity and often aroused by racism. However, with a sentence handed down in 1942, the Supreme Court had already sanctioned the absence of protection of the First Amendment for anyone who, with the offense procured by aggressive or insulting words (fighting words), was responsible for the provocation of violent reactions, or disturbance of the peace.

The spread of the first speech codes, in the late 1980s, had gone hand in hand with the propagation of a critical, polemical, and sarcastic use of the expression politically correct (and political correctness). A considerable part of public opinion had begun to distance itself sharply from the absolute and unassailable values embraced by those codes – values imposed by a cultural orthodoxy suspected of wanting to drag American society back into the past. With the excuse of inclusion and self-determination, the aspiration to a civilizing universal equality, the unstoppable achievement of equal rights between men and women, and compensation for the sufferings and injustices suffered by millions humiliated and subjected for centuries to the colonialist, white and western male, a bourgeois-born neo-progressivism had returned to spread the creed of communist totalitarianism of half a century before, accentuating its moralizing demands and aiming at achieving a much more ambitious ultimate goal. The abolition of the economic disparities produced by capitalism gave way to the delegitimization and cultural dismantling of Western civilization in the name of a catechetical and radical ethical relativism, with the proletariat replaced by the excluded, the marginalized, the oppressed, the “different” of all possible species: sexual, ethnic, religious, cultural. ←10 | 11→And starting in the early seventies, with the rise of environmental movements, even plants and animals.

More of an ideology (transversal) than a “mindset”

On 15 November 2017, the author Michela Murgia, in an article for the weekly L’Espresso, advocated the replacement of the Italian word patria with matria, as a way to remedy the damage caused by the nationalist patriotism of the abusive male. On 7 June 2021, in another piece for the same periodical (“Perché non basta essere Giorgia Meloni”), the Sardinian writer would use the schwa (ə) of genderqueer extremism, and three months later (7 September) her novel Morgana. L’uomo ricco sono io published by Mondadori, and co-written with Chiara Tagliaferri, would make headlines as the first Italian book to be written with an inverted e symbolizing the neutral.

On 7 January 2018, at the theater holding the event Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the premiere of Bizet’s Carmen was staged under the direction of Leo Muscato, who decided to change the ending in order to take a strong stand against femicide. The heroine does not die at the hands of Don José, who stabs her in the original libretto; instead, she is the one who kills him by shooting him. However, due to technical problems, the gun jammed twice and the actors were booed by the audience. Years earlier, on the other side of the ocean, the second part («You’ll be a Man, my son!») of the last line of Rudyard Kipling’s famous 1895 poem (If) had been “neutralized” as «You’ll be grown up, my child!» In addition, two lines from an iconic pacifist song by Bob Dylan (Blowin’ in the Wind, 1962) had turned into: «How many roads must an individual walk down / before you can call them an adult » (originally: «How many roads must a man walk down / before you call him a man»).

Details

Pages
110
Publication Year
2023
ISBN (PDF)
9782875747433
ISBN (ePUB)
9782875747440
ISBN (Softcover)
9782875747426
DOI
10.3726/b20312
Language
English
Publication date
2023 (March)
Published
Bruxelles, Berlin, Bern, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2023. 110 pp., 16 fig. b/w.

Biographical notes

Massimo Arcangeli (Author)

Massimo Arcangeli is a linguist, literary critic and writer. He teaches Italian Linguistics at the University of Cagliari, directs numerous cultural festivals, collaborates with public radio and television and with some of the most important national newspapers.

Previous

Title: Genderless Grammar