Category talk:Actors

We really should have a page that discusses all these terms - actor/actress, author/authoress, aviator/aviatrix - and the various historical trends that lead to feminine versions of terms being created and then use of them changing over time, and the various feminist positions over time -- (a) claiming & inventing gendered terms to create visibility; (b) rejecting gendered variants as unnecessarily gendered; (c) reclaiming gendered variants as cute/kitsch/feminist history/separatist/etc.; (d) politically correct editorial avoidance of gender-specificity and leading us right back to problems of erasure .... and i started thinking about english but actually broadening it to be "gendering in language" would enable discussion of the different kinds of gendering in language. of course i don't have enough linguistics to write about that. in english we have joanna russ' the female man, to some extent, and gender-neutral pronoun movement; in french, louky bersianik and ... someone, who is the major french feminist theorist on this issue? blanking. have there been major SFnal treatments besides bersianik's? (and i read euguelionne in english so i grokked it mostly from footnotes, as i recall, but even that was >10 years ago.) ... --LQ 16:18, 20 March 2007 (PDT)

I haven't read much SF in French that dealt with the issue of gender in language from a feminist POV... mostly because I haven't read much SF in French, period, since gendering in French is precisely one of the issues that drives me up a wall when I read (or write) in that language: the sexist grammar that is annoying enough (like a slap in the face with every page) in everyday use becomes an even bigger stumbling block for SF worldbuilding. And a lot of the SF I've read in French was translated from the English or another language, and therefore not preoccupied with addressing French's indigenous expressions of sexist ideology. Élisabeth Vonarburg's translation of Jayge Carr's Leviathan's Deep (which I read ages ago) did do some interesting work on that, which I think she picked up again in her own Chroniques du Pays des Mères later on, peripherally, but I can't think of anything else SFnal offhand. Céline Labrosse is a linguist québécoise who's written on the issue of non-sexist language in French. English is a relatively unmarked tongue: the words themselves are neither masculine nor feminine, the grammar is mostly uninflected (and certainly not by gender), and only rare words refer specifically to people according to gender. The issue of gendering in language can be one of the most insidious expressions of sexist ideology, because language is so pervasive and so essential to one's thought processes. It is extremely hard to break free from the ideology in the first place, and, thereafter, you hit the problem of trying to communicate with others. But it leads back to the overall issue of gender. --Ide Cyan 17:34, 20 March 2007 (PDT)