Representations of Gender in the Francophone Context of Quebec and Canada: La Feminisation Linguistique in Principle and Practice (Report‪)‬

Introduction: the linguistic representation of gender Debate about the representation of gender in the francophone context has been concerned to a great extent with issues surrounding la feminisation linguistique, (1) which refers mainly to individual lexical items such as professional titles, though some research has addressed a much broader and more comprehensive range of issues. In the latter category, the work of inter alia Marina Yaguello (1978) in France and Celine Labrosse (1996) in Canada are of particular note, in that both authors address a very wide range of relevant morphological, syntactic, and semantic issues. The anglophone context generally seems to have devoted attention from an early stage to discussion under the general heading of sexist / non-sexist language. This might be considered an interesting sociocultural difference in itself, and one might pose the question: Why did the debate center particularly on la feminisation in the francophone world, particularly in the early stages of the 1970s and 1980s? Apart from the specificity of the macro social contexts and the relative impact of the feminist movement in the French- and English-speaking worlds, at least a partial answer to that question is to be found in the linguistic typology of the languages themselves. The presence of grammatical gender in French means that issues of gender, however defined, are unavoidable. It is not possible to refer to a lawyer or a doctor, who happens to be a woman, in a neutral way in French: one has to make a choice between "l'avocat" or "l'avocate," "le docteur" or "la docteure," and "le professeur" or "la professeure.'" Remaining grammatically neutral is not an option, by contrast with English, where the terms "the lawyer, .... the doctor," and "the teacher" are--at least theoretically--applicable to either a man or a woman. (2) Those opposed to la feminisation point to the notion of the arbitrary nature of the sign and to the existence of examples of titles that are grammatically feminine, despite the occupation they denote being largely occupied by male rather than female incumbents, e.g., "la recrue," "la sentinelle." The existence of this small number of examples is not sufficient evidence to conclude that there is in any sense a kind of "grammatical equality" about the attribution of gender m the case of professional titles. The proponents of la feminisation seek to disprove the idea that there is anything arbitrary in the notion that some titles are only masculine, while others have a masculine or feminine form, especially as some commentators (e.g., Biron, 1991) have pointed to a correlation between the relative prestige of a profession and the presence or absence of a corresponding feminine title. Louise Lariviere makes the case for feminization in the context of equality, including grammatical equality: "L'egalite dans la difference, cela se traduit egalement, dans l'optique de la feminisation linguistique, par le fait qu'un genre grammatical ne doit pas avoir preseance sur l'autre" (2000, 29). The issue is obviously not a purely linguistic one, but one which falls squarely into the domain of sociolinguistics, and, due to the wider issues it raises at societal level, is of concern to any discipline focusing on the relationship between language and society, including, but not limited to, feminism, gender studies, social policy, or psychology. Commentators from all these disciplines have referred to the desirability or otherwise of implementing la feminisation, as have policy makers and the public at large.