The origin of sexism in language

Authors

  • Ann Coady Sheffield Hallam University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.31445

Keywords:

sexist language, language ideologies, queer linguistics, grammatical gender

Abstract

Although previous work on sexist linguistic structures has identified the causes of sexism in language as stemming from an androcentric world view, it has not described the social and semiotic processes involved in the historic production and reproduction of this kind of linguistic sexism. This article uses the three processes of iconisation, fractal recursivity, and erasure to bring together what appear to be disparate phenomena (such as the masculine generic, and even the very existence of the feminine grammatical gender) into a unifying theory. Iconisation results in the binary division of humanity into females and males; fractal recursivity explains how this division was projected onto language; and erasure demonstrates how certain discourses have been ignored, to the profit of others. A Queer critique of the two concepts of binarity and markedness (which arise as a result of iconisation) opens up exciting new ways to approach sexism in language, and to revitalise research in this area.

Author Biography

  • Ann Coady, Sheffield Hallam University

    Ann Coady is a PhD student at Sheffield Hallam University. Her thesis is a comparative study of feminist linguistic reforms in French and English, specifically the ideologies of language that emerge in debates about politically motivated language change. Her other research interests include corpus linguistics, CDA, historical linguistics, Queer linguistics and language planning. Her publications include 'La Construction socio-discursive du masculine générique: discours et contre-discours' in Bailly et al. (eds), Pratiques et langages du genre et du sexe: déconstruire l'idéologie sexiste du binarisme (2016), and 'Mademoiselle va-t-il perdurer "malgré les oukases"?' in Cahiers de Linguistique (2014). 

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Published

2018-10-22

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Articles

How to Cite

Coady, A. (2018). The origin of sexism in language. Gender and Language, 12(3), 271-293. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.31445