Wednesday, 14 October 2009
French Feminists
At my French evening class, we were discussing mixed gender classrooms and schools and how people nowadays are reconsidering it. One of the groups cited to now maybe be opponents of mixed classrooms were feminists. When referring to them, the pronoun used was "elles". Now immediately the thought came to my mind "What if there was a male feminist?". If there is even just one male feminist in the group referred to, the pronoun used MUST be "ils", that is, the masculine third person plural. I wonder how the feminists feel about that? And with that, those who support inclusive language in the Bible (which for me is unfaithfulness on the part of the translator)?
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Hilarious. It almost makes you want to join a French feminist group, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, at my uni in Britain I'm practically already in one. The majority of the people of my course are women - liberal, feminist women - and so I loved it when I was the only guy in a conference interpreting class as the very feminist lecturer HAD to refer to us all with masculine adjectives, nouns and pronouns, like "puisque vous êtes étudiants..."
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