Critical Reflection 2

Directions: describe a moment and analyze: “Write about a single experience or moment, and ask: how does this moment, experience, or encounter relate to my essential question?”

• You can also compare it with learning experiences you have had elsewhere, whether in or out of a classroom, at LREI or elsewhere.

Something I have been thinking about a lot during this week is words or phrases that don’t exist across languages and how this impacts our understanding of the world and of language. This week I had to translate a lot of thought experiments in which a hypothetical character is evoked. In the original French text, these characters always bear a gender because in French there only exist two pronouns: il (he) and elle (she). So when reading through each scenario, I am forced to picture either a man or a woman in the story, even if gender is irrelevant to the concept that the author is trying to illustrate or prod at. Because even if the only indication of gender is a single “he” or “she,” it still, consciously or unconsciously, affects our interpretation of the scenario. I discussed this issue with my philosophy professor and asked her how she would like me to translate these kinds of things: does une personne remain elle or does it become someone referred to by a gender-neutral pronoun they?

In the English-speaking world we are seeing more and more a sort of gender liberation; people are growing more comfortable voicing and exploring which pronouns suit their gender expression best. This is rendered possible by our gender-neutral they, or by neo-pronouns such as xe. In countries like France, though, and I believe this is the case with all places that speak romance languages, there is no gender-neutral pronoun. So in a place like France, how can one even think of gender beyond the binary when the language does not even have the vocabulary for it? Nietzsche said of language that it is bearer of intrinsic philosophies, and I think this pronoun dilemma illustrates this. Through an absence of a neutral, we learn about the (de facto) beliefs of a language and the beliefs that it passes on to its speakers.