Gender Language

[hankhank at ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

On Wed, 27 Nov 1996, RICHARD ROMEO wrote:
> If we only knew Chinese, there is no "He" there is no "She".  

Or Finnish. 

HA"N (pronounced like "hand" if you drop the d off) covers both HE and SHE. 

Which of course creates interesting situations when we try to speak other
languages. In an international panel discussion I have referred to Gayatri
Spivak as "he", which really hasn't helped me to defend my case. In a
similar context a colleague of mine once said "as Christine Brooke-Rose
writes in one of his books"; there was a chill, not so gentle, among the
strongly feminist audience. 

Or vice versa. After auditing a New Historicist keynote lecture on English 
Romanticism by a British Professor in Finland some years ago, I managed to
rise my wiseguy hand first: "So, in other words, could we say that Keats
undoes Kant's aesthetic idealism just when she most fervently promotes it?"

Heikki