triskellian | Critical discourse analysis for fun and profit

I've been thinking for a while about trying an experiment in the way I use language, and something that came up in my reading today made me decide to go ahead and do it.

The experiment is this: I will watch for times when I'm about to use "he" to refer to a person of unknown gender, and I will substitute "she" instead (I'm talking about speech; I take care to use non-gender-specific language in writing). I think I mostly do this with the drivers of nearby cars, when I'm predicting they're about to do something stupid ("He's going to pull out!"), so there's no value judgement involved, just an attempt to change the default setting on a switch, so to speak ;-)

I invite you to join me in this experiment if you wish, and to call me on it if you spot me using "him" as a generic (also if you wish!)

The reading that prompted this is for the Good Course (as opposed to the Bad one), which is on critical discourse analysis. The material we're currently covering is to do with the way ideology shapes language, and through it the world, and I've just finished reading a chapter on the way "common sense" encodes and enforces a particular way of understanding the world. (This same material is causing me to write and rewrite every sentence in this post as I notice the assumptions I'm building into the most innocent-looking phrases.)

Anyway. The words that solidified my intention to proceed with the experiment describe a way of foregrounding common sense, of making its working obvious and therefore open to question:

"the deliberate disturbance of common sense through some form of intervention in discourse"
(Normal Fairclough, Language and Power)

...And they're a reasonable description of my experiment, too. So that settled the matter ;-)

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I find the area of how language defines thought to be very interesting.

I remember being fascinated by the concept that the Romans couldn't deal as well with abstract algebra because of their way of counting, and (from a very limited perspective) I have found that phrasing things in French did change my own perception of how I thought.

I imagine that a German speaker would think a bit differently as well, due to the need of having your verb worked out and held onto until the end of your current sentence. I don't know if that helps to explain their famous technical and musical abilities or not, but it's an interesting possibility.

Personally, I'm not going to go changing my 'neuter' pronoun to being expressly female, as I have in the past felt irritated by those who do. It also makes insulting other drivers on the road (at least in my mind - I don't actually say anything!) less acceptable. Insulting a female is something I have to specifically want to do, and needs a good reason. Insulting another male, on the other hand, is almost expected...

See a BMW for example - think 'wanker'. Nice and simple. ;-)

Personally, I'm not going to go changing my 'neuter' pronoun to being expressly female,
I nearly included a line saying something about how the experiment makes much more sense when done by a woman. It's certainly possible I'd feel uncomfortable about you always using female pronouns. But, just as it makes sense for you to use male pronouns for generic people, it makes sense for me to use female ones.

as I have in the past felt irritated by those who do.
May I ask why it's irritated you, and whether your irritation depends at all on the gender of the speaker?

May I ask why it's irritated you?
It seemed convoluted is all. Disrupted the flow of conversation and 'jolted' me out of what someone was saying by the inconguity. I found I was thinking more about their deliberate use of the 'incorrect' pronoun than what they were actually saying.

and whether your irritation depends at all on the gender of the speaker?
Not as far as I recall, no. It's annoyed me in printed works too - examples that deliberately use 'she', for example, seem to be labouring a point.

That's not to say the point isn't a valid one, I'm just callin' it like I see it, obviously.

I like the line from Real Genius -
"I heard there was going to be someone new this term, are you it?"

"It seemed convoluted is all"

Not actually that unreasonable - by definition gender pronouns are a closed set so introduction of new neutral forms is likely to be difficult in linguistic as well as social terms. 'Man' as a generic term for the species is an obvious example.

I think he's talking about the use of "she" as a generic, rather than about new non-gender-specific pronouns...

See, this sort of instinctive reaction to it is part of why I'm trying to do it - why should it be "correct" to use male pronouns for a person whose gender you don't know? Why is that person more a man than a woman?

Count yourself lucky you aren't French - you'd have to answer this question for every single noun in the language rather than just for people of unknown sex.

No: it's slightly different, I think. In French, all of the nouns have apparently arbitrary genders. There's nothing arbitrary about the use of "he" for people of unknown sex. I think the question is more about "why do we consider he as the default" than "why do we use he for x and she for y?"

In French, all of the nouns have apparently arbitrary genders.

Even if they are arbitrary, and have no origin in any issues of sex, you could still investigate whether they influence attitudes, just as triskellian is doing for our "gender-non-specific" pronouns.

I have an article around somewhere about an experiment where speakers of different languages with gendered nouns were asked to describe various objects that had different genders in their languages (eg, say in French car is feminine and in German it's masculine). The result was that the gender of the noun did influence people's perception of the object - in my made up example, the French speakers were more likely to say things like "curvy" to describe a car, whereas the German speakers were more likely to say things like "powerful".

in German it's masculine

Das Auto, surely (i.e. neuter)?

They're not, it's just the current rules of English.

Why should it be "correct" to spell 'lose' and 'loose' differently?

They're not, it's just the current rules of English.
It did used to be the correct form, but it's a bit old-fashioned now, and certainly no longer set in stone to the extent that it's incorrect to use anything else. And language changes because of the way people use it, so to a small extent, I can change the language by the words I use. (I'm not frivilous about this - one of my hats is "editor", so I do know the blacks and whites and greys of current English usage.)

Why should it be "correct" to spell 'lose' and 'loose' differently?
Cos they're different words with different meanings and different pronunciation? ;-)

Cos they're different words with different meanings and different pronunciation?

Explain 'bow' then.

Yeah, the English language is made up of wildly contradictory bits of loads of other languages, so lots of it makes no sense. The difference is that the identical spelling of "bow" and "bow" isn't reinforcing any kind of power relationship, whereas much gender-specific language is.

I have friends who use weird (to me) "gender neutral"-type pronouns along the lines of "zie" and "zir" and so on. I am bound to say it grates on me a fair bit, when I read it, far more than the use of "she" does. Though the use of that does occasionally surprise (rather than irritate) when I see it in an academic text, or something.

As an aside, the shift from having he/him as "gender neutral" has occasionally caused me problems in middle Welsh; in some of the famous love poetry, they use "dyn" (man) to mean the girl they're writing the poem to, which causes me great confusion.

/this post brought to you by insomniac rambling inc.

Critical discourse analysis for fun and profit

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