Queer speakers and gendered language: A new linguistic gender typology

The primary motivation behind queer gendered language reform proposals over the past several decades has remained the same: social gender can be grammaticalized, and for many speakers, this presents a problem (Wittig, 1985). Where gendered distinctions appear in the grammar, they are usually binary and leave little or no opportunity to express gender-neutrality or gender-inclusivity unless speakers create an innovative form of personal reference. Yet even for masculine-feminine morphological (or grammatical) gender, perhaps the most obvious example of this phenomenon, many linguists still argue that linguistic gender is unrelated to social gender, even where people are referenced. While we are now beginning to understand how the possibility of expressing gender-inclusivity can be created in gendered languages (e.g. latinx, elle 'they [sg.]' in Spanish; Acosta Matos, 2016, iel 'they [sg.]' in French; Knisley, 2020), current definitions of linguistic gender fail to address its complex interconnection with social gender and the other gendered features of language (e.g. personal pronouns, lexical gender) which are excluded from descriptions of morphological gender. This paper explores a new linguistic gender typology—one that takes as starting point queer speakers’ identifications of grammatical distinctions based on social gender—in order to ground the issue of gender in language with relation to gender self-identification, isolating those systems which have linguistic gender distinctions based on social gender from those which do not. Special focus is placed on typologically dissimilar languages—for instance Mandarin Chinese, wherein feminine gender can be marked with its own radical (e.g. 她 'she')—to decenter the study of Western languages and cultures through this approach. In this way, evidence that some linguistic gender is at least partially related to social gender, provided by nonbinary and other queer speakers who have innovated nonbinary forms of personal reference, may be incorporated into a new theory which contends that social gender categories may become encoded into language, and that these are not closed categories. The establishment of such a theory seeks to systematize research on nonbinary gender in language and assert the humanity of the issue and its critical importance to gender-nonconforming speakers.

https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/lavlang/2021/sunday/18