BetFaM2021: Between feminine and masculine: language(s) and society Universidade Catolica do Portugal & online Lisbon, Portugal, December 9-10, 2021 |
Conference website | https://www.lattice.cnrs.fr/betfam2021/ |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=betfam2021 |
Submission deadline | August 15, 2021 |
The main motivation of the symposium “Between Feminine and Masculine – Language(s) and society”, which will take place on December 9th and 10th online and (pandemic context permitting) on-site in Lisbon, Portugal, with a hybrid format, is to provide scientific data for the reflection on the possibility of gender-inclusive language and the possible evolution towards gender-neutral language – an ongoing process in much of the Western world, albeit not without debates.
While the first symposium of the series, held in Paris in 2019, focused on Romance languages[1], this second edition proposes to include issues of language and gender in Germanic languages, which are both genetically related to Romance and typologically different. The main issue of the symposium remains the question of how research into language and gender can help find ways to use inclusive language: (a) what has been done in Romance and Germanic languages to be linguistically inclusive? (b) what has worked best? what are the pros and cons of various methods?
Since the end of the 70’s, the issue of language and gender has fostered an abundant literature in various domains: linguistics, psychology, sociology, literature (see i.a. Boel 1976, Moulton et al. 1978, MacKay & Fulkerson 1979). There has been a steep increase in interest for these issues in recent years, possibly in relation to the me too movement and, more generally, the increased attention devoted to social inequalities.
The body of literature on gender in linguistics clearly points to the existence of a typologically common imbalance between genders, with strong disparities, however, across languages. In some languages, gender is explicitly marked, with morphosyntactic morphemes, typically on nouns, adjectives and pronouns, sometimes on verbs; in other, it is marked only in pronouns, or barely marked at all. Such systems are far from balanced, or symmetrical: like all linguistic paradigms, they contain exceptions – one important source of asymmetry being the so-called generic use of the masculine, another one the existence of semantic asymmetries (see e.g. for French Yaguello 1978[2]). One question in point is whether the imbalance in linguistic gender systems is purely the result of the natural evolution of language, or whether it results at least partly from human intervention, as has been suggested, for instance, for French (Viennot 2014).
Another issue is whether this gender asymmetry is a source of discrimination. Is it a minor issue with little importance for society – are there, as has been said over and over again, other, more important issues to deal with, such as equal pay? Or is it an important issue, having consequences for the cognitive build-up of children? This has been a key question in psycho-linguistic studies on gender, and experiments have shown repeatedly that the gender asymmetry, and specifically the generic masculine, do have an impact on our cognitive representations, in English, German, French, and probably whatever the language (Trömel-Plötz 1978, Braun et al. 1998, Stahlberg et al. 2007, Gabriel & Gygax 2016, Gygax et al. 2019). Like algorithms (Bolukbasi et al., 2016), humans seem to be sensitive to the discriminations induced by gender asymmetries.
A final question (for now) is whether this asymmetry is inevitable, or if there are ways to go toward a greater balance between genders. For instance, much has been said and written about the neutral Swedish pronoun hen (Sendén et al. 2015), but neutral pronouns have appeared in other languages, e.g. English they or, with a more limited audience thus far, French iel or al (Alpheratz 2018). Scholars who study the various ways of achieving gender equality in language, e.g. in German (Steinhauer & Diewald 2017), French (Dister & Moreau 2020), including comparative studies (Elmiger 2008) do not necessarily agree on how we should go about this. Is it possible to come up with a toolkit for inclusive language?
[1] Fagard, Benjamin & Gabrielle Le Tallec (eds), to appear. Entre masculin et féminin. Français et langues romanes. Paris : PSN.
[2] With masculine-feminine word pairs in which the feminine only has pejorative or degrading connotations, e.g. gars “boy” / garce “prostitute”, courtisan “courtier” / courtisane “prostitute”, etc.; in English, master / mistress.
Submission Guidelines
All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. Abstracts (between 500 and 1,000 words, i.e. 1 or 2 pages, including references, in English, Portuguese or French) must be submitted via Easychair. Submission deadline: August 15th.
Committees
Organizing Committee
- Ana Margarida Abrantes, CECC, Universidade Católica do Portugal
- Marine Delaborde, Lattice (ENS, Sorbonne Nouvelle & CNRS; PSL)
- Benjamin Fagard, Lattice (CNRS, ENS & Sorbonne Nouvelle; PSL)
- Peter Hanenberg, Universidade Católica do Portugal & CECC
- Gabrielle Le Tallec, Cergy & Lattice (CNRS, ENS & Sorbonne Nouvelle; PSL)
Scientific committee
- Ana Margarida Abrantes, Universidade Católica do Portugal & CECC
- Marie-Ève Arbour, Office Québécois de la Langue Française
- Giuseppe Balirano, University of Naples « L’Orientale »
- Bernard Cerquiglini, Université Paris 7
- Ann Coady, Aix-Marseille Université
- Marine Delaborde, Lattice (ENS, Sorbonne Nouvelle & CNRS; PSL)
- Daniel Elmiger, University of Geneva
- Benjamin Fagard, Lattice (ENS, Sorbonne Nouvelle & CNRS; PSL)
- Auphélie Ferreira, Lattice (ENS, Sorbonne Nouvelle & CNRS; PSL)
- Peter Hanenberg, Universidade Católica do Portugal & CECC
- Gabrielle Le Tallec, Paris XIII & Lattice (ENS, Sorbonne Nouvelle & CNRS; PSL)
- Rita Librandi, University of Naples « L’Orientale », Accademia della Crusca
- Inés Lozano, Universitat Politècnica de València
- Machteld Meulleman, Université de Reims
- Martin Pleško, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
- Laure Sarda, Lattice (ENS, Sorbonne Nouvelle & CNRS; PSL)
Invited Speakers
- Gabriele Diewald, Universität Hannover
- Daniel Elmiger, Université de Genève
- Bernard Cerquiglini, Université Paris 7
Venue
The conference will be held in the Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, and online.
Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed to colloque-masculin-feminin@ens.fr.
Sponsors
DGLFLF (https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Sites-thematiques/Langue-francaise-et-langues-de-France)
Lattice laboratory (https://www.lattice.cnrs.fr/)
CECC, UCP (https://fch.lisboa.ucp.pt/cecc)
References
Alpheratz, Grammaire du français inclusif, Châteauroux, Vent Solars, 2018.
Boel, Else, Le genre des noms designant les professions et les situations féminines en français moderne, Revue Romane 11, 1976, p. 16-73.
Bolukbasi, Tolga, Chang, Kai-Wei, Zou, James Y., Saligrama, Venkatesh & Kalai, Adam T., Man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker? debiasing word embeddings, Advances in neural information processing systems, 2016, p. 4349-4357.
Braun, Friederike, Gottburgsen, Anja, Sczesny, Sabine & Stahlberg, Dagmar, Können Geophysiker Frauen sein? Generische Personenbezeichnungen im Deutschen, Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik, n° 26(3), 1998, p. 265-283.
Dister, Anne & Moreau, Marie-Louise, Inclure sans exclure. Les bonnes pratiques de rédaction inclusive, Bruxelles, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, 2020.
Elmiger, Daniel. La féminisation de la langue en français et en allemand : querelle entre spécialistes et réception par le grand public, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2008.
Gabriel, Ute & Gygax, Pascal, Gender and linguistic sexism., Language as social action: Vol. 21. Advances in intergroup communication, Howard Giles, Anne Maass (dir.), 2016, Berne, Peter Lang, p. 177-192.
Gygax, Pascal, Schoenhals, Lucie, Lévy, Arik, Luethold, Patrick & Gabriel, Ute, Exploring the onset of a male-biased interpretation of masculine generics among French speaking kindergarten children, Frontiers in psychology 10, 2019.
MacKay, Donald G. & Fulkerson, David C., On the comprehension and production of pronouns, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, n° 18, 1979, p. 661-673.
Moulton, Janice, Robinson, George M. & Elias, Cherin, Sex bias in language use. Neutral pronouns that aren’t, American Psychologist 33, 1978, p. 1032-1036.
Sendén, Marie Gustafsson, Bäck, Emma A. & Lindqvist, Anna, Introducing a gender-neutral pronoun in a natural gender language: the influence of time on attitudes and behavior, Frontiers in Psychology 6, 2015.
Stahlberg, Dagmar, Braun, Friederike, Irmen, Lisa & Sczesny, Sabine, Representation of the sexes in language, Social communication, 2007, p. 163-187.
Diewald, Gabriele, Steinhauer, Anja, Richtig gendern. Wie Sie angemessen und verständlich schreiben. Berlin, Dudenverlag, 2017.
Trömel-Plötz, Senta, Linguistik und Frauensprache, Linguistische Berichte Braunschweig 57, 1978, p. 49-68.
Viennot, Eliane, Non, le masculin ne l’emporte pas sur le féminin. Petite histoire des résistances de la langue française, Donnemarie-Dontilly, Éditions iXe, 2014.
Yaguello, Marina, Les mots et les femmes, Essai d’approche socio-linguistique de la condition féminine, Paris, Payot, 1978.