“Reinas unidas jamás serán vencidas”: Drag queens in the Iberian Spanish voice-over of RuPaul’s Drag Race

RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009 – present) is an American reality television programme launched by RuPaul Charles, which has turned drag queens into a mainstream phenomenon. After briefly analysing the controversial figure of the drag queen in the light of Judith Butler’s performative turn, as well as drag lingo following Keith Harvey’s framework for identifying camp talk, this research aims at investigating the European Spanish voice-over of Seasons 8 (2016), 9 (2017) and 10 (2018). This work seeks primarily to analyse the choices that are made in the target text to characterise drag queens in the localised European Spanish version available on Netflix. The translation procedures mentioned in this study are partly adapted from Ranzato’s (2015) classification for culture-specific references. The analysis focuses mainly on the creative rendering of (semi-)homophony, drag terms, references to pop culture and grammatical gender.

Gender bias in morphological inferences

The present study explores how language learners apply gender stereotypes in learning a novel language with grammatical gender. Adult, English-speaking participants were exposed to picture–sound pairs from a miniature language. Each picture was of a matched gendered professional (e.g., male tennis player, female tennis player) with a nonsense form [CVCV-go/gu]. Participants were exposed to 32 picture–sound pairs (16 male, and 16 female, all matched) five times in a randomized order. Following training, participants were given a two-alternative forced-choice test with novel picture–word pairs. Participants were presented with a novel picture paired with two words (e.g., [befegu vs. befebo]) and were asked to choose which word most likely portrayed the meaning conveyed by the picture. These novel items contained gender-matched professions (e.g., male and female chemist), neutral items (office supplies), stereotypically female items (makeup), and stereotypically male items (tools). Participants assigned the appropriate gender to the novel professions, and assigned gender in line with the stereotyped objects at a rate significantly greater than chance (but not for neutral items). These results support the hypothesis that learning a language with a binary grammatical gender might be influenced by gender stereotypes.

Sufijación y género gramatical

Suffixation and Grammatical Gender. The presence in the Spanish language of words like la silla (chair) and el sillón (armchair), el lago (lake) and la laguna (lagoon), la casa (house) and el caserón (mansion) or la corbata (tie) and el corbatín (bow tie), leads us to wonder if the grammatical gender change in these pairs of non-sexed nouns is justified due to a variation in the size of the object – a type traditionally studied as a dimensional genre – or if it is imposed by the suffix that is added to the root in one of the forms, irrespective of whether or not it is a modification based on the dimensions of the object. Under this approach, we will try to address a topic which pivots on flexive morphology and derivational morphology and to which the etymology of each of the analysed forms will have a great deal to contribute in order to draw conclusive results. Keywords: grammatical gender, suffix, derivational morphology, flexive morphology

The Influence of the Gender Asterisk (“Gendersternchen”) on Comprehensibility and Interest

Recently, the gender asterisk (“Gendersternchen”) has become more widespread in grammatical gender languages in order to represent all genders. Such gender-fair language is intended to help better address women and other genders and make their interests and achievements more visible. Critics often argue this would make the language less comprehensible and less aesthetically appealing. Two experiments examined the effects of the gender asterisk on text comprehensibility, aesthetic perception, and interest. N = 159 and N = 127 participants were randomly provided with a text in either masculine-only form or alternatively in gender-fair language with the gender asterisk. The results of the first experiment showed no impairment of comprehensibility and aesthetic evaluation of the texts by the gender asterisk and no effect on interest in the game, while the second experiment showed significant impairments of comprehensibility, aesthetic evaluation, and interest in the game by the gender asterisk. The proportion of singular forms is discussed as a possible explanation for the different results. Experiment 1 predominantly used plural forms like die Spieler*innen (∼“the fe*male players”) and did not include forms such as der*die Spieler*in (∼“the*the fe*male player”), whereas Experiment 2 included many such more complex singular forms. We argue that this issue might be crucial, and that it deserves full attention in future studies.

Grammatical gender and stereotypical gender associations with inanimate nouns in the ‘Germanic sandwich’

This pilot study is a contribution to the theoretical debate on the impact language has on general cognition. More specifically, we applied a Word Sketch collocator (an innovative NLP tool operating on large-scale corpora) to collect human adjective collocations of masculine, feminine, and neuter inanimate nouns in German, Dutch, and English to see whether there is a correlation between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the adjective collocations most frequently used to describe those nouns. Later, in a series of online questionnaires, we examined the impact of grammatical gender and stereotypical gender associations on the perception of inanimate nouns (e.g., street, lamp, bottle) by testing the gender associations of their human adjective collocations obtained from the Word Sketch collocator in German (a grammatical gender language), Dutch (a language with a combination of grammatical gender and natural gender), and English (a natural gender language). In German, the results show that grammatical gender alone is not a decisive factor in causing masculine or feminine gender associations of inanimate nouns. Rather, it is the combination of grammatical gender and stereotypical gender associations of nouns that plays a role. In English, nouns associated with neutral, masculine and even feminine gender had significantly more neutral adjectival associations. In Dutch, nouns with common and neuter gender resulted in a higher proportion of masculine adjectival associations because these nouns are mostly referred to with common and masculine pronouns. We observed a special role played by stereotypical feminine associations of nouns in German, Dutch, and English.

How grammar and culture interact in Zamucoan

This paper analyzes the interaction between language and society in the Zamucoan languages (†Old Zamuco, Ayoreo and Chamacoco), spoken in south-eastern Bolivia and northern Paraguay. I show how grammatical gender was a source for poetic metaphors, systematically shaping Ayoreo mythology, and how change in Chamacoco cosmovision correlates with the development of gender switch in animal nouns. Also, some mismatches between linguistic and natural gender reflect the role of women in Ayoreo society. The relationship between the father and the first legitimate child is particularly important for the Ayoreo and is expressed through a teknonymic suffix. The attention to the preservation of the environment and the social practice to share consumable resources are reflected in the impossibility to directly possess animals and plants in Zamucoan. Competition did not play an important role in Zamucoan societies, which are traditionally egalitarian, and there are hints that Zamucoan had originally no dedicated comparative structures.

neutering neuter – grammatical gender and the dehumanisation of women in German

Grammatical gender in German has traditionally been described as a rather arbitrary system (Helbig and Buscha 1988). 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 (Köpcke and Zubin 1996, 2009). The use of neutral gender in reference to women nevertheless has a long history in German, usually with pejorative connotations (Köpcke and Zubin 1996, 2009). Historically, this can be illustrated in relation to nouns, pronouns and articles: 1 By neuter nouns denoting ‘socially incomplete’ women, e.g. das Weib ‘woman (archaic), hag, n.’, das Luder ‘hussy, n.’ and in the increased use of neuter eliciting diminutives in reference to female individuals, e.g. das Mädchen ‘girl, n.’, das Fräulein ‘miss, n.’ (Nübling 2017). 2 Through the use of neuter pronouns and neuter articles in combination with female names in a number of German dialects, e.g. das Emma, es ‘the (n.) Emma, it’ (Busley and Fritzinger 2018). In contemporary standard German, the use of neuter articles and pronouns instead of feminine ones seems to be used as a discursive tool to denigrate and dehumanise women whose gender performance does not conform with hegemonic concepts of femininity. This paper focuses on the intentional manipulation of grammatical gender in reference to women as a tool of degradation and dehumanisation and outlines the historical development of neuter forms of reference in contexts where feminine would be expected.