Art Heals: She

For those of us old enough to remember, (meaning, me) the cartoon character Popeye the Sailor Man declared "I yam what I yam….”  Those existential words popped into my head during my second cup of coffee this morning. Existentialism being a coffee-driven construct.   Living here in isolation, with one male figure IRL and a lot of disembodied voices and flickering visages populating my world, I have begun to question my sense of identity.  Who yam I?  Woman, friend, wife, zoomer, curator, short person.  But in all these rather shaky incarnations, I identify as feminine.  (Well, in the harsh light of the bathroom mirror, pre-coffee, let’s just say female.)  This is easy enough for me as I speak English, a language that allows me my choice of genderless nouns (like curator, or shorty.)  In addition, gender-neutral neologisms are entering mainstream English to encompass those who identify as non-binary or as genderless.  Myself, I am generally identified as she (as in, she needs more coffee to become herself).

However, I also speak German and French, and there the battle of the sexes takes place in the arena of the Article. For example, in French, the masculine gender (le)

supplants the feminine (la) when both, man and woman (they) are referred to in the plural. This inevitably leads to those masculine professionals such as doctor (le médecin), firefighter, (le pompier) and dentist (le dentist) among whom I am sure you have never seen a woman.

But the really interesting thing about this linguistic stereotyping is that grammatical gender can influence one’s thinking. (And you thought all those charts you had to memorize in English class were only to pass Wednesday’s pop quiz.)  There have been some fascinating experiments about this.  In one study, native speakers of Spanish and German, who were all fluent in English, were given English nouns to which they had to attach adjectives.  So, “key”  was seen as “hard, heavy, jagged, metal, and useful” to the German speakers, where the noun in German is masculine, while the Spanish speakers judged it as “ golden, intricate, little, lovely, and tiny,” as the Spanish word is feminine.  I yam what I yam doesn’t apply.

This kind of semantic sorting hat can, and does, sway our thinking in any culture, stereotyping qualities that lead to judgmental and often discriminatory behaviors.

This takes me to the coronavirus (doesn’t everything these days?)   In France, some people have been saying "le Covid," that bad boy.  But the august body of linguistic purification 

the Académie Française has protested! The acronym is feminine! They declared that “the use of the feminine gender would be preferable, and it may not be too late to return the acronym to its proper gender.” Whew.  Blame the girls. Adam and Eve all over again.

Thought I would give you a girl, this time, by Helen Zughaib.  Don’t know about the cat. Art Heals.