by Ade Grossi
Institutionally approved Italian mandates binary gender inflectional markers, precluding speakers from communicating in a non-gendered manner. For many non-binary users this means not being able to adequately refer to themselves and their experiences. In the past few decades, both activists and scholars have been working on and promoting different grammatical strategies to move beyond binary gender communication. Nonetheless, the vast majority of Italian speakers are either unaware of or opposed to these advancements, in part due to the forceful condemnation of these novel strategies published in 2021 by the Accademia della Crusca (Crusca Academy), a leading Italian language institution. Scotto di Carlo’s work on gender-inclusive language in Italian provides a quantitative understanding of practices and attitudes from a diverse variety of speakers, while leaving open the question of motivation for non-binary individuals’ preferences. Through grounded thematic analysis of nineteen semi-structured interviews, this research examines what aspects influence non-binary people’s choices of self-referential grammatical (non)gendered forms in Italian. Four main aspects affecting individuals’ linguistic choices were identified: identity, performance and interpretation; feasibility; habitus; and exhaustion.