A few years before Gunther Kress and Robert Hodge published their groundbreaking study Language as Ideology (1979), the Spanish road engineer and autodidact philosopher and linguist Álvaro García Meseguer also considered the relationship between language, power, and discrimination in Lenguaje y discriminación sexual (1977) or Language and Sexual Discrimination. While Kress and Hodge focused on class inequalities in the English language, García Meseguer explored sex inequalities that years later he would correct, noting he previously confused sex with gender.
Before publishing his first book, García Meseguer published the article “Sexism and Language” in the journal Cambio in 1976 where he argued for the use of a common gender letter, suggesting the “e” to replace the “a” and the “o.” He said, “Since the endings in o and a are, in most cases those of the masculine and feminine, a simple solution is to assign the ending in e to the common gender, that is, to the person.” For example, instead of the masculine form for friend amigo and the feminine form for friend amiga, he offered the common gender form of amige.
In 1994, García Meseguer published ¿Es sexista la lengua española? (Is the Spanish Language Sexist?) of which he once again confirmed: yes. García Meseguer struggled with the question whether the language or the speaker/listener was at fault in constructing a sexist language. In later years, he placed more blame on the speaker/listener noting the Castilian (Spanish) language is innocent but also impacted by sexist and gender discriminatory language heavily promoted by the Real Academia Española. In a 2001 speech to the Women and Media Communications Congress in Murcia, Spain, García Meseguer underscored that while the Spanish language is sexist, English is more so. He explained, “English is a language that does not know gender but does have direct marks such as possessives, where references to male and female are used.” However, García Meseguer does make some important arguments about the underlying sexism in the Spanish language. For example:
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– Gaps in vocabulary that do not give certain words an option for women such as caballerosidad (chivalrous) or hombria de bien (manliness of good).
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– Embedded stereotypes i.e. in professions: “El fiscal resulto ser una mujer.” (The prosecutor turned out to be a woman)
He underscored that sexism in a language can also look very differently. In sexist language, there is sexism in reading the text versus sexism in syntax. There is a difference between a sexist message with non-sexist language, and a non-sexist message with sexist language. The result in both cases is sexist comments.
For those interested in further readings by García Meseguer see his analysis of the “semantic jump” here and his pedagogical approach here.
