Concealing labels.
Someone wrote…
[I am] writing an email to my father and delighting in concealing gender labels when mentioning my love life.
Do you delight in concealing gender labels too?
Posted by julian on February 14th, 2009 at 08:00 am
Category: your voice 4 comments »
February 14th, 2009 at 9:45 am |
I have never concealed, but I often forget.
I had a friend studying a BA in linguistics and taped a month’s worth of phone conversations for them without asking what the study was about.
Turned out it was about gendered communication, and nearly all my speech was anomalous, and really made her study more difficult/interesting.
One example she gave me was a five minute anecdote I was telling a friend about meeting someone and having a small connection with them…Apparently I broke all the rules because I never established in the whole five minute anecdote, whether it was a he or she I was referring to.
My friend broke all the rules as well, because they never asked me….must’ve been used to it.
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February 14th, 2009 at 9:51 am |
That’s a really great story. I’m glad you could throw a spanner in their linguistic study. Or at least show that non-gendered speech -is- used.
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February 14th, 2009 at 10:55 am |
I’ve done that quite a lot, actually. In fact, I’ve written a fantasy story where the final reveal is that the knight is a female, but just won the princess’s hand.
The entire story was without gender pronouns for the knight. It was lovely. I do that a lot with people in real life too. I talk about my fiancee, never mentioning that she is a woman.
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February 14th, 2009 at 5:13 pm |
My aunt just sent me a story about a kid who had an accident while hir father was abroad. When someone took hir to the emergency room, the hospital director said “that’s my son.” (The director’s gender isn’t specified at any time.) You’re supposed to guess what happened; apparently, most people don’t realize that a hospital director can be a woman, or that kid might have two fathers.
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