Like it or not,
inclusive language is already on the agenda for publishers, the media and a
number of institutions
(As language professionals, we have to know it)
Anyone who undertakes the beautiful work of
recounting the history of languages will emphasize that major changes have
taken place in tandem with profound transitions (just think of the journey of
Latin into the Romance languages), that such changes are imperceptible and we
have scant record of them. As is
obvious, this latter point has been modified by new technology. We
live in a time when everything that happens to us is recorded, and accordingly,
we have an up-to-date awareness of new developments like the one we are
addressing now. Indeed, I would like to draw upon this latter consideration to point
out that it would be most interesting (and enriching for the study of our
language) if scholars in academia were to conduct qualitative and quantitative
research on inclusive language.
Surely many of us have had to put up with teasing
about inclusive language (IL). In
Argentina, it’s common to hear that people who talk with an “e” (the “latest
scream of fashion” after previous attempts like “@” or “x”) are just a bunch of
“woke” teenagers. It’s also commonly associated with a certain political
ideology.
And surely we will agree that these groundless comments
about language and its behavior are understandable, let’s say, in one way of reckoning, and yet those of us
who are language professionals can and must inform ourselves about it, even if
we wish to reject it.
Our role as translators goes beyond mere
linguistic counseling. It’s a kind of cultural counseling. We have to be able
to provide our clients (who are inquiring about the subject more and more each
day) with solid arguments that sometimes IL is required, sometimes optional and
other times rejected. A very good example of its required use appears in the
character Pollution which the author Neil Gaiman includes in his series Good
omens. Pollution is neither
male nor female, which is how the name must be translated because that’s the
way the author created it. Allow me to share with you a text I translated for
Penguin (with the publisher’s permission). The text is from the book Bodies
are cool (Los cuerpos son geniales) by Tyler Feder, and in it
there is a non-binary character (they) in the original, and so it was
translated (as elle).
It should be noted, on the other hand, that in
the various other fields people work in, these issues are not as important as
they are in the domain of language. When you go through profiles on the
internet you can see that it’s rare for an engineer to include her pronouns in her
profile, but common for those who work for publishers to choose to identify
themselves as he, she or they.
In other words, even for our
own interactions on the job, it’s useful for us – both as a matter of courtesy
as well as business sense – to pay attention to such things, given that in our
professional lives we appear to be more sensitive to people’s different ways of
addressing each other. If someone
decides to tell the world that she is a cis woman or that they are a non-binary
person, then that is how such people should be addressed.
In defense of the masculine “o” that renders
women and diversity invisible, it is argued that, “The use of the masculine ‘o’
to include both men and women is fully assimilated in standard usage and
plainly understood.” Okay, but … when I was a girl, insults like ‘faggot’ and ‘retard’
that were fully assimilated and plainly understood, nowadays … make our hair
stand on end.
A lot of people ask what difference does it
make if a woman is called a jueza (“judgess”) instead of a juez (“judge”).
It makes a big difference because it renders the feminine a visible, which
in Spanish tells us that the person is a woman, and using the a underscores
the fact that the position is occupied by a woman (given the importance that
such a presence has in and of itself, the language should reflect this). Let us
recall that many English-speakers choose to insert the honorific Madame before
the word president (which is itself neuter and would create no problems)
to emphasize that there is a woman serving as president.
It’s perfectly clear to us what the
relationship is between a thing and the word that refers to it. One invents
something, then gives it a name that expresses that something (digital
native, for instance). And yet, going the other way is not clear to us:
when a word modifies a particular something.
In one of their functions, words illuminate
reality with stark clarity: in the performative function. Just seconds after a
president announces that Mr. So-and-So shall henceforth assume the duties of
the Minister of Health, that So-and-So IS the Minister of Health. Words have
such great weight that even in our technological civilization, the ancestral
custom of swearing oaths persists. This
is a ceremony in which words solemnly uttered before an expectant audience will
inscribe a particular fact on marble in our minds. We speak of artificial
intelligence, yet we keep relying on words to express what it will become.
That’s how important words are.
On a more mundane level, let us recall the
power that advertising has over people. How does that deodorant make me feel?
Cleaner? More in synch with the times? Sexier?
All of this is analyzed among the three pillars of the advertising
tripod (advertising company, ad agency and media), and is validated in focus
groups exploring the (sought-after) target’s reaction to these words. (And to
refer to them as Targets… it almost seems that someone is shooting at
them, and they’re victims, doesn’t it?). Essentially, goals will be achieved by
the words that are used. Think of other examples from other domains and periods
that are just as effective: I had a dream. Just do it. Women don’t
cry any more, they make money.
The words of erotic literature stir things up
in our bodies. No one can deny it.
When we hear the word “lemon” repeated again
and again, our mouth waters.
In this connection, we recommend that you read the
New York Times article cited in the sources because it takes up this
sort of influence (the effect that words have on reality). Through an
examination of the word “pudendum” it was shown that in order “not to say
certain words” (due to shame), many women do not look after their own health.
According to a survey conducted by the NGO The Eve Appeal in 2014, 65% of the
women surveyed avoid getting gynecological checkups in order not to have to say
the word vagina.
In particular, because we are word
professionals, we can, and indeed, must understand how powerful they are. Time
will tell whether the letter “e” will become assimilated in Spanish usage as an
inclusive morpheme for women, men and diverse identities, or whether new ways
of “speaking more justly” will arise.
But the main thing is that the debate is now under way.
It is vital to bear in mind that this movement to
make language “speak more justly to all people” is not only taking place in the
Spanish language. Language specialists, as well as speakers simply interested
in linguistic fairness are looking for ways to indicate diversity: in French
with an asterisk, in Italian with the schwa, in Swedish with the
creation of a neuter personal pronoun (hen), and the same can be seen in
other languages like Portuguese, Turkish, Catalan and others.
As we have been saying, words modify reality.
They can make us want things and consume them. They can say things justly or
reproduce hate speech. They empower or they wound. And fundamentally, words
tell us who we are as we use them: our geographic origin, perhaps our
professional training, our political affiliation, our ideology, our vision of
the cosmos – even if we’d rather they didn’t. Our words say us.
What does the use of the masculine
gender as a generic communicate about a person (whether real or fictitious)?
What is revealed by the use of expressions like “cuerpa” instead of “cuerpo” (body),
“miembra” instead of “miembro” (member) or “yuta madre” instead of “puta
madre” (a substitute for whore mother,
colloquially often meaning something like bloody hell)? And doubling up
with “todas y todos” (all females and all males) or “todas, todes y
todos” (all females, all non-binaries and all males). Or if instead of the neomorpheme “-e”, one
resorts to “x” or “-@”?
It is clear that there is an underlying vision
of gender, and of what constitutes sexism in language.
What is gender?
Gender is a social and
cultural construction that is traditionally binary; this means that societies
attribute to individuals certain values, thoughts, feelings and behaviors based
on whether they are men or women. Simone de Beauvoir (2016, p. 269) once said
“one is not born a woman: rather, one becomes a woman.” Drawing on queer theory,
Judith Butler (1988) goes deeper and maintains that gender is not an internal
reality, it is not something given, but rather a phenomenon that is constantly
produced and reproduced. It is performative because we are not only performing
a role, we are constructing it as we act it out, through our behavior, our
attire, our way of speaking. And here the two-way process that we’ve
been discussing of mutual influence between language and reality comes
into play once again.
Gender identity is defined as
the internal and individual experience of gender as each person feels it, which
may or may not match up with the sex assigned at birth (Law 26743). If the two
coincide, we speak of people who are cisgender; if not, of people who are
transgender. This latter term is an umbrella term that encompasses many gender
identities; some sources speak of as many as 94 (Sexual Diversity, 2023).
We can distinguish two
paradigms around the concept of gender, with their respective communication
strategies and convictions on what constitutes a sexist use of language. It should be noted that these two points of
view overlap and coexist at present.
The first paradigm is based on
a fixed and restrictive conception of gender (the man/woman distinction), which
treats gender (or sex) and genitality as the same thing.
The first feminisms and
women’s movements struggled against the privileged position of men over women,
but did not question the binary division (and there are those who still uphold
this view). Accordingly, in many societies and languages, there appeared guides
and recommendations seeking an egalitarian language that would include and
respect women. Among the most common
suggestions are avoiding the generic masculine, lexical gaps, apparent-duals
and other sexist usage.
The strategies used are:
doubling up
the @ (because it
looks like a feminine “a” combined with a masculine “o”);
the generic feminine
(used by a minority)
a series of
stratagems for avoiding marks of gender: abstract nouns, paraphrasis, periphrasis,
impersonal constructions and so on.
It should be noted that this view
of gender is also shared by those who think these approaches are unnecessary
because the masculine includes women as well.
The second paradigm calls into
question the categories of “man” and “woman,” and recognizes a vast diversity
of gender identities, as we have already noted.
It is within this paradigm
that what is popularly known as “inclusive language” has arisen, and that we,
following the translator and researcher Ártemis López (2019), refer to as
“direct non-binary language.”
Non-binary language
López distinguishes two
strategies for writing outside of binary categories, which they call direct
non-binary language (DNL), and indirect non-binary language (INL).
DNL consists of
using a new gender morpheme: “-e” and “-x” are the most commonly used variants,
though not the only ones. The suffix “-e” took hold not only because it’s
easier to pronounce, but also because the other options are incompatible with
screen readers used by people who are blind or vision-impaired, which would
thereby create another kind of exclusion.
DNL has two contexts for its use:
1.
As generic (the use that is most resisted, even by certain feminisms)
2.
To designate people who are non-binary, of fluid gender or other gender
identity who expressly choose not to use either the masculine or feminine to
describe themselves.
On the other hand, INL is the
same strategy suggested in the first paradigm: to avoid the marks of gender
through impersonal constructions, abstract nouns, etc.
Our role and professional ethics
To those of us who work with translation,
interpretation and editing, why should these questions matter? If our work is
to build bridges of communication and enable that particular voice to express
itself and convey exactly what it wants to convey, both denotatively and
connotatively, then it behooves us to be able to discern the underlying gender vision
and implement the appropriate linguistic and communication strategies.
Just as we are giving the finishing touches to
this text the controversy over rewriting the works of Roald Dahl has broken
out, which we cannot fail to mention. Dahl – like any other person – chose to
construct a reality with his words, both in his literature as well as in his
own life. We do a great disservice to
today’s children if we conceal the fact that these realities also exist.
So it is not a matter of using the morpheme “-e”
indiscriminately. We’re not going to put it in the mouth of the protagonist of American
Psycho, of Bret Easton Ellis, or of any infamously macho or transphobic
public figure.
But we do have to know when and how to use it:
for instance, it’s mandatory for the character Morgan in the acclaimed novel Girl,
woman, other by Bernardine Evaristo, or for artists like Sam Smith, who
expressly and publicly declared that they were non-binary.
Over and above any controversy, and regardless
of our own stance on the matter, in our capacity as intermediaries and advisors,
we who are engaged in the language professions must rise to the occasion.
After all, as Margaret Atwood said: “A word
after a word after a word is power.”
Aurora Humarán / Erika Cosenza
Third Congress of the North American Academy of
Spanish Language (ANLE)
Coral Gables (Miami, USA)
May 2023
