Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T06:20:14.512Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - The Neutering Neuter

The Discursive Use of German Grammatical Gender in Dehumanization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2022

By
Miriam Lind  and
Damaris Nübling
Edited by
Natalia Knoblock
Natalia Knoblock
Affiliation:
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan
Get access

Summary

Grammatical gender in German has traditionally been described as a rather arbitrary system. This is not the case in regard to terms of person reference, where natural gender assignment is the norm: masculine and feminine grammatical gender largely correlate with the extralinguistic assignment of male and female gender. Neuter gender predominantly denotes inanimate entities. The use of neuter gender in reference to women nevertheless has a long history in German, usually with pejorative connotations. In contemporary standard German, the use of neuter articles and pronouns instead of feminine ones appears as a discursive tool to denigrate and dehumanize women whose gender performance does not conform with hegemonic concepts of femininity. The dehumanizing use of neuter gender can further be found in online hate speech directed at trans women and nonbinary individuals. This chapter presents an analysis of the discursive manipulation of grammatical gender as a linguistic tool of dehumanization. It first presents an overview on the distribution of neuter grammatical gender for nouns denoting women within the language system and uses this as a backdrop to analyse occurrences of neuter reference to women and nonbinary people in hateful social media discourse. These findings are explained and theorized from a frame semantic perspective.

Keywords

Hate speechgendernonbinarydehumanizationGermanframe semantics
Type
Chapter
Information
The Grammar of Hate
Morphosyntactic Features of Hateful, Aggressive, and Dehumanizing Discourse
 , pp. 118 - 139
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aikhenvald, A. (2016). How Gender Shapes the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bach, A. (1952). Deutsche Namenkunde I. Die deutschen Personennamen, Teilband 1. 2. stark erweiterte Auflage. Heidelberg..Google Scholar
Bareket, O. et al. (2018). The madonna–whore dichotomy: Men who perceive women’s nurturance and sexuality as mutually exclusive endorse patriarchy and show lower relationship satisfaction. In: Sex Roles 79, 519–532. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-018-0895-7.Google Scholar
Bickes, C. & Mohrs, V. (2010). Herr Fuchs und Frau Elster : Zum Verhältnis von Genus und Sexus am Beispiel von Tierbezeichnungen. In: Muttersprache 4, S. 254–274.Google Scholar
Busley, S. & Fritzinger, J. (2020). De Lena sein Traum: Soziopragmatisch motivierte Genusvariabilität weiblicher Rufnamen. In: Kempf, Luise, Schmuck, Mirjam und Nübling, Damaris (eds), Linguistik der Eigennamen (Linguistik – Impulse & Tendenzen). Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 347–376.Google Scholar
Corbett, G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Damen Conversations Lexikon (1834–1838). Herloßsohn, Carl (ed.) (www.zeno.org/damenconvlex-1834).Google Scholar
ElSherief, M. et al. (2018). Hate lingo: A target-based linguistic analysis of hate speech in social media. In: International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM).Google Scholar
Fillmore, C. J. (2006). Frame semantics. In: Geeraerts, D. (ed.), Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 373–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, C. J. & Baker, C. (2012). A frames approach to semantic analysis. In: Heine, B. and Narrog, H. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 313–340.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gygax, P. et al. (2019). A language index of grammatical gender dimensions to study the impact of grammatical gender on the way we perceive women and men. In: Frontiers in Psychology 10:1604. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01604.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansen, K., Littwitz, C. and Sczesny, S. (2016). The social perception of heroes and murderers: Effects of gender-inclusive language in media reports. In: Frontiers in Psychology 7:369. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hockett, C. (1958). A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Imai, M. et al. (2014). All giraffes have female-specific properties: Influence of grammatical gender on deductive reasons about sex-specific properties in German speakers. In: Cognitive Science 38, 514–536.Google Scholar
Irmen, L. & Roßberg, N. (2006). How formal versus semantic gender influences the interpretation of person denotations. In: Swiss Journal of Psychology 65, 157–165.Google Scholar
Köpcke, K.-M. & Zubin, D. (1996). Prinzipien für die Genuszuweisung im Deutschen. In: Lang, Ewald and Zifonun, Gisela (ed.), Deutsch – Typologisch. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 473–491.Google Scholar
Köpcke, K.-M. & Zubin, D. (2009). Genus. In: Hentschel, E. and Vogel, P. (eds), Deutsche Morphologie. Berlin: de Gruyter, 132–154.Google Scholar
Lautenschläger, S. (2018). Geschlechtsspezifische Körper- und Rollenbilder: Eine korpuslinguistische Untersuchung. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Lind, M. & Späth, L. (forthc.). Von säugenden Äffinnen und trächtigen Elefantenkühen: Zum Geltungsbereich der Genus-Sexus-Korrelation. In: Diewald, G. and Nübling, D. (eds), Genus, Sexus, Gender: Neue Forschungen und empirische Studien zu Geschlecht im Deutschen. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Lobin, H. (2021). Sprachkampf: Wie die Neue Rechte die deutsche Sprache instrumentalisiert. Berlin: Dudenverlag.Google Scholar
Löffler, H. (1992). ‘Persönliche Kollektiva’ und andere Personenbezeichnungen im Alt- und Neuhochdeutschen. In: Burger, H., Haas, A. and Matt, P. (eds), Verborum Amor: Studien zur Geschichte und Kunst der deutschen Sprache. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 33–46.Google Scholar
Mathiot, M. & Roberts, M. (1979). Sex roles as revealed through referential gender in American English. In: Mathiot, M. (ed.), Ethnolinguistics: Boas, Sapir and Whorf Revisited (Contributions to the Sociology of Langue 27). The Hague: Mouton, 1–27.Google Scholar
Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In: Winston, P. (ed.), The Psychology of Computer Vision. New York: McGraw-Hill, 211–277.Google Scholar
Mithun, M. (2015). Gender and culture. In: Corbett, G. (ed.), The Expression of Gender. Berlin, München, Boston: de Gruyter, 131–160.Google Scholar
Nübling, D. (2014). Das Merkel : Das Neutrum bei weiblichen Familiennamen als derogatives Genus? In: Debus, F. et al. (ed.), Linguistik der Familiennamen (Germanistische Linguistik 225–227). Hildesheim: Olms, 205–232.Google Scholar
Nübling, D. & Lind, M. (2021). The neutering neuter: Grammatical gender and the dehumanisation of women in German. In: Journal of Language and Discrimination 5 (2), 118–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nystrand, M. (2019). Überlegungen zur Beziehung zwischen Genus und Sexus im Deutschen und Schwedischen mit ein paar Beispielen aus der Pferdewelt. In: Lunder Arbeitspapiere zur Germanistik 11, 1–26.Google Scholar
Pestalozzi, J. H. (1783). Über Gesetzgebung und Kindermord. Frankfurt.Google Scholar
Robinson, O. (2010). Grimm Language: Grammar, Gender and Genuineness in the Fairy Tales. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Schmidt-Jüngst, M. (2020). Namenwechsel. Die Funktion von Vornamen im Transitionsprozess transgeschlechtlicher Personen. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×