Discourse Ks – Gonzaga Debate Institute 14

Gendered Language

No Link & Offense -

No link – language can have different meanings in different context. The K is a totalitarian attempt at thought policing that should be rejected as dehumanizing

Ross Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, Los Angeles Valley College 2006

(Kelley L. “Against the theory of sexist language”, http://www.friesian.com/language.htm May 26, 2006. Accessed 7/5/14, ESB)

Such defensiveness and bad faith accompanies the widely held conviction that the theory of "sexist language" and the program to institute "gender neutral" language are absolutely fundamental to the social and political project of feminism, to the point where mere criticism of the theory or the project can themselves be condemned as "sexual harassment" and subject to attempts at legal sanction. The theory of "sexist language," however, is no credit to feminism, for it is deeply flawed both in its understanding of the nature of language and in its understanding of how languages change over time. Since the ideology that there is "sexist language" seeks, indeed, to change linguistic usage as part of the attempt to change society and forms of thought, the latter is particularly significant. That the public and the intelligentsia have not been alerted and alarmed long ago that the project of "non-sexist language" is a clear example of what George Orwell called "New Speak," and is thus the reflex of a totalitarian ideology, continues to be alarming in its own right. Nor can we be reassured of the innocence of the goal when the feminist motto, "the personal is political," itself embodies a totalitarian rejection of privacy, private life, and the domain of civil society -- a Marxist politicization of all human existence. Nevertheless, the treatment here focuses on the linguistic issues, rather the ideological background, for which other pages at this site can be consulted.

First of all, the theory of "sexist language" seems to say that words cannot have more than one meaning: if "man" and "he" in some usage mean males, then they cannot mean both males and females in other usage (i.e. nouns and pronouns can have both masculine and common gender). This view is absurd enough that there is usually a more subtle take on it: that the use of "man" or "he" to refer to males and to both males and females means that maleness is more fundamental than femaleness, "subordinating" femaleness to maleness, just as in the Book of Genesis the first woman, Eve, is created from Adam's rib for the purpose of being his companion. Now, the implication of the Biblical story may well be precisely that Adam is more fundamental than Ev;e, but the Bible did not create the language, Hebrew, in which it is written. If we are going to talk about the linguistic structure of Hebrew as distinct from the social ideology of the Bible, it is one thing to argue that the system of grammatical gender allowed the interpretation of gender embodied in the story of Adam and Eve and something very much different to argue that such an interpretive meaning necessarily underlies the original grammar of Hebrew -- or Akkadian, Arabic, Greek, French, Spanish, English, Swahili, etc. -- or that such a system of grammatical gender requires such an interpretation. What a language with its gender system means is what people use it to mean. It is an evil principle to think that we can tell other people what they mean by what they say, because of some theory we have that makes it mean something in particular to us, even when they obviously mean something else. Nevertheless, there is now a common principle, in feminism and elsewhere (especially flourishing in literary criticism), that meaning is only in the response of the interpreter, not in the mind of the speaker, even if the speaker is to be sued or charged with a crime for the interpreter having the response that they do. There is also on top of this the Marxist theory of "false consciousness," which holds that "true" meaning follows from the underlying economic structure, today usually just called the "power" relationships. Most people are unaware of the power relationships which produce the concepts and language that they use, and so what people think they mean by their own statements and language is an illusion. The implications of these principles are dehumanizing and totalitarian: what individual people think and want is irrelevant and to be disregarded, even by laws and political authorities forcing them to behave, and speak, in certain ways. But they are principles that make it possible to dismiss the common sense view that few people speaking English who said "man" in statements like "man is a rational animal" were referring exclusively to males, even though this usage was clear to all, from the context, for centuries before feminism decided that people didn't "really" mean that. But even if some speakers really did mean that, it is actually irrelevant to the freedom of individuals to mean whatever they intend to mean through language in the conventionally available forms that they choose. What was meant by the gender system in the languages that ultimately gave rise to Hebrew is lost in whatever it was that the speakers of those languages were saying to each other; but what we can say about the functioning of gender systems and about language in general is very different from the claims that the theory of "sexist language" makes.

No Link - Meanings Fluid

Words are given meaning by their context

Shepherd, Lecturer in International Relations and International Law, 2010

(Laura, March 2010, International Committee Red Cross, “Women, armed conflict and language – Gender, violence and discourse”, http://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/irrc-877-shepherd.pdf, date accessed 7-4-14, CLF)

This theoretical agenda starts from the premise that no ‘thing’ has a material reality prior to language. There is no universal and unproblematic initional lexicon to which we as scholars or practitioners can refer. All concepts come to have meaning through the context of their articulation. This may seem counter-intuitive. Surely a woman is a woman is a woman, regardless of her ‘context’? This is not in fact the case, for as we can learn through engagement with poststructural gender theory,11 we can never ‘fix’ the identity of ‘woman’ independent of context. It may be strategically useful to speak of women, or directly necessary to speak with women. In some cases it might even be politically justifiable to speak for women, but we can never assume that we know who we are including and excluding in the category of ‘women’. Further, we cannot assume that those to whom we speak have the same understanding of women as we do, that their boundaries of inclusion and exclusion map on to our own. Finally, even if we were to agree with all concerned that we know what the category of ‘women’ is – that it includes, for example, post-operative male-to-female transsexuals and self-identified butches and bois12 but excludes, for example, drag queens, female-to-male transsexuals and self-identified sissies13 – we could not, as the examples given demonstrate, say with any certainty that we know what ‘woman’ means.

Alternative Fails

Words are fluid and don't just have one meaning – alternative creates linguistic confusion

Ross PHD Department of Phsycology at Los Angeles Valley College 2006

(Kelley L. “Against the theory of Sexist Language,” http://www.friesian.com/language.htm. May 26, 2006 Accessed 7/4/14, ESB)

The word "sex" -- clearly evocative of an unequivocal demarcation between men and women -- has been replaced by the pale and neutral "gender," and the words "man" and "he" -- now avoided as if they were worse than obscenities -- have been replaced by the neuter "person" and by grammatically confusing, cumbersome, or offensive variants of "he/she" or "she" alone as the pronoun of general reference. Since it was never even remotely in doubt that when used as a general referent, the male pronoun included females, this change was never designed to prevent confusion. The change has, on the contrary, often created confusion. Its purpose is solely ideological. I, for one, want to be free to refer to "the brotherhood of man" without being corrected by the language police. I want to decide for myself whether I should be called a chairman, a chairwoman, or a chairperson (I am not a chair). I want to see My Fair Lady and laugh when Professor Higgins sings, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" As a writer, I want to know that I am free to use the words and images of my choosing. It is common today in public discussion, whether the context is academic, political, or even legal, to take it for granted that using the word "man," in isolation or as a suffix, to refer to all of humanity, or using the pronoun "he" where any person, male or female, may be referred to, is to engage in "sexist language," i.e. language that embodies, affirms, or reinforces discrimination against women or the patriarchal subordination of women to men. Thus the American Philosophical Association offers "Guidelines for Non-Sexist Use of Language," which it says is, "A pamphlet outlining ways to modify language in order to eliminate gender-specific references" -- as though that is an unproblematic, rather than an Orwellian, goal. Not everyone agrees with this view, and "he" and "man" often seem to creep inappropriately into the speech of even those who consider themselves above such transgressions; but the ideology that there is "sexist language" in ordinary words and in the ordinary use of English gender rarely comes under sustained criticism, even in the intellectual arenas where all things are supposed to be open to free inquiry. Instead, the inquiry is usually strongly inhibited by quick charges of "sexism" and by the other intimidating tactics of political correctness.

AT: “Womyn”

Woman is proper and should be accepted—history

Bosustow, Blogger, 13

[Eseld, 6-22-13, Blogspot, “Why I will never use the spelling "womyn”,” http://eseldbosustow.blogspot.com/2013/06/why-i-will-never-use-spelling-womyn.html, accessed 7-5-14, PAC]

One must understand the actual etymology of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) words and their usage in order to find some sort of gendered issue with a word like "woman". First let me start by pointing out a fact about Old English and pretty much all Germanic languages: the word "man" has only quite recently (by standards of language) come to refer to male human beings specifically in the English language. "Man" has traditional been synonymous with the word "person" in modern usage, or a human being regardless of sex or gender identity. The modern German word for human beings is "Menschen".

So in the traditional notion, there's nothing anti-feminine about the word "man", and nothing about it inherently exclusive of females. The verb "to man", as in "to man the battle stations", comes from this earlier usage (i.e., "to place persons in the battle stations"). So too is it for some compound words like "manpower". Even as far back as the early to mid 20th century we understand a more poetic and archaic usage of "men" to mean "all human beings". Tolkien referred to human begins as the race of Men. Neil Armstrong references "mankind" in his first steps during his moonwalk, and no one would make the argument that "mankind" (i.e., the kind of beings known as "men") was in any way exclusive of females. Gene Roddenberry spoke of worlds "where no man has gone before" despite the fact that he had women manning his Enterprise (see what I did there?).

This poetical use of "man" is actually the proper use. It can be argued that the current connotation of "man" as a "male (adult) human being" is actually proper, and I would concede that current usage is important to consider. But there's no reason why the more ancient usage needs to be forgotten just because of the current usage of a word, and even contemporary culture is well-aware that "man" can be used to mean "human" or "person".

So if "man" was never necessarily meant to refer to an adult male, what were the words for adult males and females? Traditionally these were wīf for what today we call a woman and wer for what today we call a man, and "man/men" referred to both collectively or as a general word for a person, a human being. Wīf, of course, is where the modern word "wife" derives, and other derivatives like "midwife", etc. "Wife" is synonymous with woman (which is why the phrase "man and wife" isn't entirely offensive except for the misuse of the word "man"... "husband" is the compound word "house-bond", the person to whose house you were bonded in marriage). We can even see wer still in use with such words as "werewolf" (i.e., a creature part male human and part wolf... which makes me wonder if a female werewolf is supposed to be a "wifewolf").

"Woman" is a derivation of the compound word wīfman, which became a necessary distinction once the word "man" was beginning to replace wer in connotation so that wer would eventually be redundant. Therefore "woman" is actually redundant as a compound word. It means "female human-human", since "wife" (or "wo-" in this word) means "female human" and "man" means "human". Ergo, besides being linguistically and philologically unwieldy, there's nothing offensive about it, as there's nothing exclusive about the use of "man" in this word.