#debuk

[principleofplenitude]

Interestingly, however—and despite the dearth of dogs named Sophia/Olivia/Amelia—the list of popular female dog-names is closer than the male one to the corresponding list of popular baby-names. To explain why that’s interesting, I need to revisit some points from an earlier post about gendered patterns of human personal naming in English-speaking societies over the past 100+ years. Research in this area has consistently found that parents are more conservative when naming boys. Girls’ names (rather like their clothes) are both more varied and more influenced by fashion, so that the rankings change more rapidly over time. One historically important reason for this—the tradition of naming boys after their fathers or other close relatives—is perhaps less relevant today; but there’s still a widespread view that ‘fancy’ names, meaning anything unusual, complicated, trendy or ‘decorative’, are more appropriate for daughters than for sons.    Another consistent finding is that English-speaking parents prefer names that clearly indicate their child’s sex, especially if the child is male. Some trendwatchers are now predicting a surge in the popularity of ‘androgynous’, ‘unisex’ or ‘gender-neutral’ names, but historically these have never comprised more than about 2% of the names in circulation, and over time they almost invariably morph into girls’ names (historical examples include Beverley, Dana, Evelyn and Shirley). What’s behind this is a form of status anxiety, reflecting the fact that gender in patriarchal societies is a hierarchical system. For girls, androgynous names are seen as status-enhancing, but for boys the opposite is true. So, as a name becomes more common among girls, it will start to be avoided by parents naming boys, until eventually it ceases to be androgynous. What’s interesting about the dog-names is that they don’t replicate these patterns: rather they reverse them. There’s more variation among names for male dogs, and more of the male names are androgynous.

“The naming of dogs” from Debuk

[principleofplenitude]

But in English, a language whose modern form makes very little use of gender-marking, it is not difficult to produce at least the surface appearance of inclusiveness. In German, by contrast, and many other languages (e.g. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Hindi) the same strategies will not work. When all nouns have a gender, and when gender must also be marked on the adjectives and articles (and in some languages, verbs) that go with them, you can’t easily avoid the issue. In these languages, the approach feminists have mostly favoured is not gender neutralisation, as in English, but gender specification (also sometimes called ‘feminisation’ or ‘the visibility strategy’)—using feminine forms alongside masculine ones so that women are explicitly included. One way of doing this is by ‘doubling’, conjoining the two forms with ‘and’, as in the German phrase ‘Studenten und Studentinnen’ (‘students (masc.) and students (fem.)’). In writing an alternative strategy is ‘splitting’, using typographical devices like slashes (‘Student/Innen’) and parentheses (‘Student(inn)en’) to avoid repeating whole words. Different devices have been favoured in different languages. In Spanish, for instance, doubled forms like ‘amigos y amigas’ (‘friends (masc.) and friends (fem.)’) have sometimes been replaced with the split form ‘amig@s’, since the @ looks like a combination of -o and -a. More recently, as the concept of gender inclusivity has broadened to encompass people who identify as neither men nor women, some writers have adopted the form ‘amigxs’, where X signifies ‘all genders and none’. In French there are numerous options. One currently much-discussed splitting device is the ‘point médian’, a centrally-positioned dot, as in ‘les étudiant·e·s’ (‘students’), which is sometimes treated as the defining feature of ‘écriture inclusive’ (‘inclusive writing’). But in fact it’s only the latest in a series of conventions which have been used for the same purpose over the years, and which in many cases are still being used: they include parentheses (‘étudiant(e)s’), hyphens (‘étudiant-e-s’), and the ‘point’ (full stop, period) in its normal position (‘étudiant.e.s’). Doubled forms are also possible (‘étudiantes et étudiants’)—some writers order the forms alphabetically while others make a habit of putting the feminine first.

“Inclusion beyond English“ from Debuk

[teacherscrapbook]

Once upon a time, someone had the bright idea of making sets of fridge magnets for young children learning to read and write. All the children were following the same school curriculum, but since t…

[principleofplenitude]

The use of titles is revealing, not only about a society’s most significant social distinctions, but also about its implicit status hierarchies. Consider, for instance, the ordering of titles on printed forms and online drop-down menus: how many of these have ‘Mr’ as the first option, followed by ‘Mrs’, ‘Miss’ and ‘Ms’, in that order? In my experience, most of them do. And what this pattern tells us is that the categories aren’t just ‘different but equal’: if they were, the order would vary. I don’t think the menu designers are engaging in conscious and deliberate sexism; they’re just using the order that seems ‘natural’. But every time they do it they’re recycling and reinforcing the common-sense assumption that men take precedence over women. There’s also an order of precedence among the female titles, and not just on drop-down menus. I noticed long ago that when organizations send me unsolicited mail, they most commonly address me as ‘Mrs’. Since they don’t know whether I’m married, you might wonder why they don’t choose ‘Ms’, the one female title that doesn’t specify marital status. But their preference for ‘Mrs’ reflects the assumption that there’s a hierarchy, in which ‘Mrs’ outranks ‘Miss’ or ‘Ms’. They’re worried that if I do happen to be married, and they don’t address me as ‘Mrs’, I’ll be offended by the downgrading of my status. If I’m not married, on the other hand, I’m unlikely to feel slighted by an upgrade from ‘Miss’ to ‘Mrs’. According to the researcher Amy Erickson, who has studied the history of the titles ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’, Englishwomen’s titles only began to reflect their marital status in the late 18th century. Until then, what they reflected was occupational and social status. In the higher ranks of society, a woman who did not have an aristocratic title became ‘Mrs’ when she reached adulthood or when her mother died, whichever happened first. In the middle-to-lower ranks, ‘Mrs’ was the title accorded to women who were either in business (for instance as drapers, grocers and milliners) or else were senior domestic servants (like housekeepers and cooks). This had nothing to do with their marital status. It was an acknowledgment of their standing in the community or the household, and the authority they wielded over apprentices or junior servants.

“Mxing It” from Debuk