Generic Man, Hen pronouns and Sex marked nouns

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  • Created by: @laura
  • Created on: 06-03-17 11:29

Generic Man

Where concepts are referred to but they only include male gender and not both men and women

Examples include:

Man to Man - Mankind - Faith of our fathers - Man power - Man up - Man overboard

This is also a RECENT ISSUE - Perth Now newspaper reports on the fact that cricket terms are male only -Batsman -Twelfth man -Fieldman this was reported in 2017!

This is similar to sex marked nouns however sex marked nouns can also be female stereotyped but the generic man can't

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Sex marked nouns

This is where the noun is modified to show gender.

For example,

Actor - Actress - have to have a different name for women in the same industry

Chairman - similar to the generic man, should it be changed to chairperson so gender isn't included in someone's profession?

Fireman - same issue as chairman

Master - Mistress - can have more negative connotations

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Hen pronoun and other gender neutral pronouns

Many literary writers are now struggling to make their work gender neutral as there is not a pronoun for both sexes, apart from 'one' which is seen as having archaic connotations

Various proposals for a neutral pronoun however little support for these:

Co (cos, coself) et (etself) heesh, hesh, hir, hirm, mon, ma, person, tholl

However even some of these sound like he/him and her/she e.g hir, hirm, mon and ma

In Sweden they made a neutral pronoun 'hen' as opposed to male and female pronouns 'hon' and 'han' and it is already being accepted

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Genderlect

This is term that suggest male and female discourse should be viewed as two different cultural dialects as they are so different

An example of gender polarisation, is this still right in today's society

Political correctness? Shouldn't language of men and women be analysed as one

Could oppose universalism where language is seen as equal whether it's from a male or female

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