queerbychoice | Projects

I'm currently engaged in a volunteer project called Build Mikie an Online Social Life. It involves telling Mikie how fantastic you all are, to convince em to add people and get to know them. I have been writing immense lengthy dissertations on the wondrousness of each of you. But Mikie is very resistant to most of my glowing recommendations, so maybe it would work better if you all just added Mikie yourselves. Um, it would help if you speak Spanish, though, because Mikie insists upon using eir journal as a place to practice Spanish - an odd language for a genderfree person to choose, I must say, and I insist it's all a classic antisocial ploy to try to scare people off. ;-)

Aside from that, the other major project I am currently engaged in is called Manage to Acquire Pretty Clothes Despite the Fashion Industry's Hideously Unacceptable Tastes. This project involves purchasing lots of plain fabric and thread and sewing my own pretty clothes, since none of the clothes sold in stores these days look anything like the pretty pictures in my head. I think I need to acquire a sewing machine too, though, or else it will take me ten years to finish making anything. I've been working on the rainbowification of my new white skirt nearly every day for about two weeks now and I'm still only halfway done.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Que es precisamente que el género en español es tan obviamente arbitrario. La mano y el labio, la rodilla y el codo. Si fuera los géneros ¨moja¨ y ¨seca¨ en lugar de ¨masculino¨y ¨feminino¨ seria la misma todavía. Usualmente no quiere decir nada más que la regla gramatica.

Y además, ellos que dicen que es imposible cambiar los idiomas románicos para eliminar el género no saben lo que dicen. Es muy fácil, por ejemplo, simplemente reemplazar un Li por El y La, o decir que todo el mundo está cubierto por el feminino y, pués, simplemente eliminar todo lo masculino del vocabulario moderno y, voila, tendríamos un lenguaje sin género tan fácilmente como cualquiera de los germánicos.

So there. :P :P

~mikie

I agree - gendered languages actually lend themselves to deconstructing the concept of gender much more than English does. Else, why does most avant-garde feminism come out of France?

Actually, I think the language just infuriates French women so much with its persistent references to more passive inanimate objects (e.g. paper) as female and to more active inanimate objects (e.g. pen) as male that it drives them to have to invent avant-garde feminism.

That's the most ridiculus thing I've ever heard. Paper is masculine.

There is absolutely no correspondence in French between a word's gender and it's function, except in the case of actual human beings.

My mother studied French for years and years and complained to me that there was quite considerable correspondence. She listed numerous words as examples; I do not remember them because I do not know any French, but her *teachers* pointed out the correspondence as a way to help the students remember which objects got which pronouns. I've heard many other people complain about the same thing. I think you should make a list of gendered words and look more carefully for trends.

La voiture - car
Le bateau - boat

La main - hand
le doigt - finger

la viande - meat
le poisson - fish

la nouille - noodle
le riz - rice

la maison - house
un appartement - apartment

I have neither the time nor the inclination to make a list of every French noun, but I assure you the above terms are typical, not exceptional. Gender in French is based on gender in Latin. Gender in Latin was assigned based on phonetics. Latin does have neuter words, most (but not all) of which became masculine upon assimilation into French. You can call that sexist if you like, but I think there are bigger battles to be fought.

Projects

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