“Anti-gender-inclusive language is the register trying to re-stabilize those epistemes, linguistically, politically and socially” : this register “looks spontaneous but is highly patterned and transnationally coherent”

He concludes that debates on point médian/inclusive morphemes are not just orthographic quarrels but "sites where epistemologies of gender are negotiated: inclusive language is both linguistic innovation and symbolic disruption of deep gender epistemes”

With such enregistement, we get staged figures of personhood: the reasonable, apolitical language guardian (looking at you, Académie Française) vs the dangerous activist

- grafting (ideological maneuver, reversal in the semiotic field where the oppressor becomes the oppressed, cf the portrayal of homosexuality as an "active minority that becomes dominant without being the majority" + mention of a “harassment promoted by homosexuals [that] relies on heterophobia” )

Looking at things through the lense of enregisterment processes such as :
- clasping (linking action to objects they name, e.g. “agressive feminist”);
- relaying (registers taken up by other groups, displaying alliances, e.g. the Vatican's opposition between "true and false" women’s emancipation);

From Violi (1987): “Les expressions ling. ne sont pas d'innocents expédients gramm.[...] Le masc. devient une cat. universelle, un terme abstrait [confondu] avec la norme, par rapport à laquelle le fém. constitue le rebut, le trait marqué. Sans preuve contraire, l'être humain est de sexe masculin"

“Accounting for the innovative use of they [...] requires an account of the status of gender features [...] I suggest that for innovative they users, gender has ceased to be a contrastive feature on pronouns, instead becoming a fully optional semantic feature.” (Bjorkman, 2017)

~ reading notes

As far as empirically supporting this claim, I am unsure of what (if any) solutions have been brought forth, but will definitely be looking into it!

More generally, she also hinges a good chunk of reasoning on the fact that erasure in society may interact with this notion of social markedness
(she draws parallels between ethnicity in gender, with the idea that we must rethink the “traditional binaries of male/not male and White/non-White”)

Tretcher (2003) mentions the Myers-Scotton (1998) Markedness Model experiment, as well as several studies looking at ethnic markedness, from which she draws the gender analysis parallel

The reasoning from Sara Tretcher (2003) is that men are prototypical in human representation (this is congruent with what I’ve read regarding male humans as human exemplars I believe) “reduc[ing] the woman/female to the status of the "subsumed," the "invisible," or the "marked" one”

I went and had a look at Anne Pauwels (2003), cited by Papadopoulos in the paragraph I quoted above, and more specifically at Sara Tretcher’s chapter where she mentions this social markedness