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

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.

A propos du séminaire

L’objectif de ce séminaire est d’accompagner les M2 et doctorants et doctorantes intéressés par l'utilisation de pratiques langagières dans des contextes comme la famille, l'école, le travail, la santé ou la justice, traversés d'enjeux de pouvoir et d'inégalités. Une place importante est laissée aux approches méthodologiques et cadres théoriques pertinents (sociolinguistique interactionnelle, sociolinguistique critique, sociologie du langage, analyse de discours, anthropologie linguistique, anthropologie politique etc.) et à la circulation de savoirs issus de zones géographiques et traditions académiques variées afin de mettre en lien l'étude des pratiques langagières avec des problématiques socio-anthropologiques et politiques contemporaines. 

Avec le soutien de l’Ecole Doctorale de l’Inalco et de l’UMR SeDyL.