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Re: He/she, Racism, and the Boundless Hipocrisy of the L
> Sure, I'll get right on it. Words aren't part of the world? Every time you
> correct your own language, that doesn't make you think about sexism? You
> know, China has a constitution with a bill of rights very similar to ours.
> I guess that oppression in China proves that the Constitution is a
> worthless piece of paper (perhaps it is for other reasons, but you get the
> point). Anyway to my understanding China does not have perfectly gender
> neutral language, Erik says they refer to women without children as
> "childless". Also, China's sexism is enforced with the barrel of a gun and
> social condemnation. It does not refute the fact that language has power
> to say that a gun has more power.
Great, more of this. First of all, "childless" actually seems like a
reasonable term - why, exactly, do you have a beef with it? Second, and
more importantly, I was referring to Chinese because of its gender
neutrality with respect to pronouns. Remember, this is a discussion of
pronouns. The point is that, even with this (which the pronoun-neutrality
folks say is important), women in China experience sexism which is
incredibly deeply entrenched. The example was brought up to show that
generalizing from the cognition studies to larger social groups is
probably not a valid approach without additional evidence. See my
response to Korcok for more information.
--Alan
__________________
Alan Dove
N3IMU
ad52@columbia.edu
http://hs1304silver1.cpmc.columbia.edu/Alan_Dove/Alan.html
References:
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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