You Can’t Be (Gender-)Neutral on a Moving Train: Inclusivity and Nonbinarity in English
摘要
In this chapter, I will first differentiate between two aspects of linguistic gender-neutrality—one narrow and one broad—and suggest that many English words and phrases which are gender-neutral in the narrow sense are not neutral in the broader sense. After considering some alternatives, I’ll argue that inclusivity and nonbinarity, considered together, create a promising framework for considering the fluctuating landscape of English pronouns and other gendered identifiers. Returning to the notion of neutrality, in addition to the linguistic sense (as in language structures and use themselves—which I have already suggested is quite fraught), true neutrality is also impossible or inadequate in the Linguistics sense, (as in doing language scholarship, whether scientific or humanist/ethnographic), and that this should be how we approach analyses of English.