Inclusive writing, a history in the making

Abstract

We seize the opportunity of this special issue of the BMS: ‘Investigating gender today’, to detail our position, as editors, on inclusive writing. Whether and how to feminise some of the writing is the subject of sometimes radical positions, for the French language in particular, but not only. Inclusive writing is thus one of many issues at stake in the denunciation of systems of domination – patriarchal, but also postcolonial and capitalist. The human and social sciences, whether history, psychology, linguistics or sociology, provide a number of arguments to support the demand for a greater visibility of the feminine in the French language (in particular): from the demonstration of the historical nature of affirming the masculine as the neutral gender, to the effects of the masculinization of job names on the professional aspirations of young women. But these arguments are, like all scientific arguments, themselves debatable. For people like us, who are committed to the most basic feminist positions, i.e. the conviction that the relationship between the sexes in contemporary societies remains very unequal, the main problem is practical: how can we feminize the language in such a way that it does not make it (too) difficult to read texts? Since inclusive writing breaks with the usual practices of academic language, it requires readers accustomed to these practices to try to adapt. It seems that this effort is short-lived and that this type of habit is in fact quite easy to change. However, the fact remains that making the feminine visible – or more precisely, to use the words of the journal Sociologie du travail, ‘making visible the situations of gender diversity and gender segregation in the social world’ – requires the use of signs, the addition of words, and the clarification of things that, in short, add to what the text is trying to demonstrate. Here, the BMS editorial team is at ease, because we have always adopted a flexible policy regarding the length of texts: we do not count words or signs, leaving authors to occupy the space they need to make their point. Should we then influence the way things are done, suggest or even impose forms and usages – feminization, neutralization, doubling of nouns, choice of signs (midpoint, parenthesis, capital E, etc.), proximity grammatical agreements, alternating genders, new pronouns, etc. – and try to contribute to standardizing a new way of writing? This seems premature to us. We prefer to indicate here to our authors that we are in favour of inclusive writing and let them choose the forms they prefer. Conversion to inclusive writing is a matter of trial and error. Different practices and conventions exist, thus contributing to the difficult acculturation of this new form. Whether it is a question of inclusive writing or, more broadly, of social sciences’ ambition towards explanation, complexity is not the problem, it is part of the solution.