Tiny dots, small vowels, big politics: The transnational circulation of anti-gender-inclusive languages

Lecture given by Prof. Rodrigo Borba (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) as part of the doctoral seminar "Pratiques langagières - terrains, méthodes, théories" led by Isabelle Léglise (CNRS, SeDyL) and Valelia Muni Toke (IRD, SeDyL).
Jeunes gens au bord du fleuve - St Laurent du Maroni, Guyane
Pratiques langagières - St Laurent du Maroni, Guyane © L. Puren, 2005‎

Drawing on enregisterment theory, this talk examines how metadiscourses against gender-inclusive language have crystallised into a recognisable transnational register linking France and Brazil. What appears as spontaneous defence of "clarity," "readability," or "grammar" is in fact a patterned metalinguistic formation with recurrent lexicon, argument structures, affective tones, and staged figures of personhood. Through processes of clasping, relaying, and grafting, fragments of anti-gender rhetoric (e.g., "gender ideology") travel across arenas (from UN conferences to Vatican lexicons, from parliamentary debates to media headlines) where they are reattached to morphosyntactic minutiae such as the point médian or the vowel -e in todes. I argue that these controversies are not about orthography but about epistemologies of gender. Inclusive innovations symbolically disrupt entrenched gender commonsense; the anti-gender-inclusive register seeks to restabilise it by naturalising cisheteropatriarchal order as linguistic common sense. In this scenario, sociolinguists play a crucial role: mapping the indexical chains that link tiny graphic marks to nationalist moral panics; exposing how rights vocabulary is inverted to portray majorities as victims; and demonstrating that registers are historically sedimented cultural modes of action, not neutral reflections of language structure. Unpacking these processes is indispensable for understanding our current political conjuncture.

About the seminar

The aim of this seminar is to support M2 and PhD students interested in the use of language practices in contexts such as the family, school, work, health or justice, traversed by issues of power and inequality. An important place is given to relevant methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks (interactional sociolinguistics, critical sociolinguistics, sociology of language, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, political anthropology etc.) and to the circulation of knowledge from varied geographical areas and academic traditions in order to link the study of language practices with contemporary socio-anthropological and political issues.

With the support of the Inalco Doctoral School and UMR SeDyL.