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France Is Debating Whether French Is Sexist

Zaretsky, Robert
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/11/20/france-is-debating-whether-french-is-sexist/

Publisher:  Foreign Policy
Date Written:  20/11/2017
Year Published:  2017  
Resource Type:  Article

In early September, French President Emmanuel Macron paid a visit to Villers-Cotterets. An hour's drive north of Paris, the village boasts as its main attraction the ancestral home of Alexandre Dumas pere."France was made through its language," he observed, when "the king decided in this chateau that all of those living in his realm had to speak French." Understandably, the children did not correct Macron: The edict simply made French, not Latin, the administrative language of the kingdom. As for the "French," they continued to speak a dozen different languages and hundreds of patois for the next 300 years or so.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Last week, Slate.fr published a manifesto titled "We will no longer teach that the masculine prevails over the feminine."

Signed by hundreds of academics, including the novelist Marie Darrieussecq, literary theorist Helene Cixous, and former Socialist Ministers Yvette Roudy and Laurence Rossignol, the manifesto's title was a provocative double-entendre. The phrase "le masculine emporte sur le féminin" invokes the grammatical rule that the masculine noun must be used whenever one refers to a mixed-gender group. This means that should a man join a group of female basketball players, les joueuses de basket transmogrify into les joueurs de basket. The math of French grammar, in short, dictates that four joueuses plus one joueur equals five joueurs. And this is what the signatories are demanding be changed through various grammatical interventions.

Inevitably and deliberately, the phrase also tapped into the intensifying debate in France over sexual predators. The shockwaves spawned by the Harvey Weinstein affair -- the countless and appalling ways in which he and other powerful men "emported" themselves over women -- are now crashing onto French shores. Since early October, tens of thousands of women have revealed their encounters of the sordid kind under the hashtag #BalanceTonPorc, which roughly translates as "Out your pig." At the same time, prominent figures have either been accused of similar crimes, or related their own experiences of sexual harassment. Two women recently accused the controversial Islamic intellectual Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen who has a significant media presence in France, of rape -- charges he vehemently denies. This week, by way of reminder that sexual harassment is an equal-opportunity employer, eight women have accused the former leader of the Socialist Party's youth movement, Thierry Marchal-Beck, of violent sexual behavior. At the same time, Agnes Buzyn, Macron's minister of health, has recounted the chronic indignities she has faced as a female doctor, while her fellow party member Christophe Arend has been accused by a legislative assistant of sexual harassment.

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