Abstract
Gender inclusive writing ("écriture inclusive" EI) has long been the topic of public debates in France. In this talk, I argue that the source of much of this debate lies in the fact that French écriture inclusive has developed into a rich social signalling system: based on a quantitative study of EI in Parisian university brochures (joint work with Céline Pozniak (Burnett & Pozniak 2020)), I argue that writers use or avoid EI in part in order to communicate aspects of their political orientations. We show that these aspects involve writers' perspectives on gender, but also stances on issues unrelated to gender, such as (anti)institutionalism and support for the Macron government. I then show how we can use game-theoretic pragmatics to analyze EI's contribution to writers' political identity construction and the consequences that this has for its use as a tool for promoting gender equality and social change.
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Title
Talk by Dr Heather Burnett, Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, CNRS and Université de Paris
Description
In this talk, I argue that the source of many of these disagreements lies in the fact that French écriture inclusive has developed into a rich social signalling system. I argue that writers use or avoid EI in part in order to communicate aspects of their political orientations and show that these aspects involve writers' perspectives on gender, but also stances on issues unrelated to gender, such as (anti)institutionalism and support for the Macron government. I then outline a research programme for studying this signalling system from a formal perspective: following Burnett (2019), I show how we can use game-theoretic pragmatics to analyze EI's contribution to writers' political identity construction and the consequences that this has for its use as a tool for promoting gender equality and social change.
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