For most of a year, I have been jamming drums at an outdoor poetry rap downtown alongside a young person who has been bringing an accordion or mandolin instead of drums, and had never said a word. Always dresses in black jacket, black pants, cute little black derby. Rather epicene and precious in demeanor. I’d always read the mandolinist as obviously female. Last night, I heard this person speak for the first time. A deep voice. 'Twas only then I noticed the wispy blond hairs growing from the chin.
FTM? MTF? Some other genderqueer concept? Or none of the above? I honestly haven’t got the faintest idea! Like it or loathe it, gender is so amazing. And not always obvious. I’m reminding myself with this to not look at gender matters so simplistically. The mandolinist is turning out to be a lesson for me in semiotics of gender, the most bafflingly complex social phenomenon I’ve ever tried to grasp.
Points for use of the word “epicene,” which we just don’t see nearly enough.
I’m guessing you don’t know this person’s name especially since you’ve only just now heard the voice, though the name might not help anyway. I’m rather more tightly locked into the binary concept of gender than I want to be. It’s partly my need to categorize. I don’t know what the rest of it is. I would like to get to the root of it, as a means of making it less important to me. Of course, I’m like that about many things which are not my business.
Your thread title’s got me picturing detectives Flint & Halloran waxing philosophical about gender ambiguity over coffee and cigarettes in high-contrast black-and-white. Much thoughtful brow-furrowing.
An androgynous looking female friend and I were yelled at by a stupid woman in a hotel restroom in NYC some years ago. The woman said “This is a LADIES ROOM.” I told her that until she came in, there were only ladies present.
Jackass.
Or should I say “Jennyass,” since she was so worried about gender?
Last night, on my drive home from work, I was pondering: what if language had no construct for the recognition of gender? How would that change the world? What if everyone and everything were simply “it”? How much does this seemingly small but very important facet of linguistics change how our society functions?
ShibbOleth, what you speculated on actually exists in reality. In the languages of Hungarian, Persian, Tajik, Turkish, Uzbek, to name a few, grammatical gender is entirely absent. Even the third person singular pronoun in those languages is the same for he, she, it: no differentiation. One genderless pronoun where English has the last vestige of its former three genders.
Are there more genderqueers or androgynes in Germany or Russia than in Italy or Arabia, because German and Russian have grammatical neuter, while Arabic and Italian don’t?
Is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis exaggerated in the popular mind? As a linguist, I think so. Language is not the only thing that determines our categories. There are deeper sublinguistic forces at work in the human psyche. Language is a higher-order phenomenon used in organizing concepts, but I’m skeptical that language actually generates concepts.
And what about languages like Danish and Dutch, in which feminine and masculine have collapsed into the same gender, leaving only two genders: combined feminine-masculine and neuter? Is this why Amsterdam is such a genderqueer-friendly place?
Maybe there are two approaches to queering gender:
Well, all I can tell you is, in my workplace the Muslims are the most relaxed about my gender transgressions. The Christians are fair to middlin about it (many of them are very nice to me), and only the Hindus give me dirty looks. Go figure.
I’m a Central Asia expert and a feminist at the same time, did you know that? Don’t get me started on the women’s situation in Afghanistan, whoa…
FWIW, while it may seem to the casual observer that Dutch knows no distinction between male and female words, it does. It’s just that, unlike for example German, we don’t specify it explicitly.
An example would be in order.
In German, “the man” translates as der Mann, and “the woman” translates as die Frau.
In Dutch, they would translate to de man and de vrouw, respectively.
However, words DO have a grammatical gender, even if they don’t have a natural one (unlike in the example above). Now, I’m not a language expert, but from what I recall from my school days, the general rule of thumb is that tangiable words are male, and intangiable ones are female, all of this subject to the rule that natural gender beats grammatical gender.
So: de vrouw = a female word, despite being grammatically male. de man = both grammatically and naturally male. de auto (the car) = male, because it’s tangiable. de vrijheid (the freedom) = female, because it’s intangiable.
… and that’s not even getting into gramatically gender-neutral words, that can describe things that are by their nature male or female.
In other words, stating that Dutch knows no gender is an oversimplification. Can’t speak for Danish, but chances are that similar caveats may apply.
As for the Dutch being tolerant towards gays and/or transgendered people, I think it’s important to understand a couple of things:[ul][]What is often perceived as tolerance, is actually indifference for the most part. The most accurate thing one can say about the Dutch is that they don’t judge others as long as those others are of no consequence to them. So sure, most people will say they have nothing against gays, yet a lot of them might react differently if it were their son or daughter. I’d say the percentage of Dutch that are genuinely unbiased against gays is well below 50%. But all in all, yes, it’s a pretty progressive country compared to others.[]I don’t think language has anything to do with tolerance. :)[/ul]
I didn’t say that Dutch had no gender, but that it had two genders. Formerly it had three, but now feminine and masculine have combined into one, call it F/M. So now the two genders are F/M and neuter. Or am I confusing this with the gender situation in Swedish? IIUC, one can tell F/M words apart from neuter words in Dutch because they’re marked differently.
I was talking only about the grammatical morphology of gender, not the implied meaning. When you say de vrijheid is feminine and de auto is masculine, the conceptual distinctions are easy to grasp, but I don’t see any difference in morphology or grammatical function. The conceptual difference isn’t marked in the language, going by this example. Is there any gender marking in Dutch that makes feminine explicitly different from masculine?
What I mean by “marking”: showing grammatical categories explicitly. In most French words, the plural is marked only in writing, not in speech. Fille is pronounced [fi:j] exactly the same as filles [fi:j].
Unless elision is triggered by a following vowel: fille aux bois [fi: jo bwa] but filles aux bois [fi:j zo bwa]. But most of the time plurals are followed by consonants, because in general more words start with consonants than with vowels, therefore French plurals are usually unmarked in pronunciation. So girls, we’re not out of the woods yet.
