by Lauren E. Duncan, Bruno Grazioli
Research in psychology and linguistics identifies ways grammatically gendered language affects the ways in which people think, perceive, and make judgements in everyday life in ways that disadvantage women, and more recently, non-binary and trans people. Activists, scholars, and politicians have worked to identify and remedy the masculinist bias in the Italian language, with mixed results. In this research article we describe how ten Italian feminist LGBTQIA+ activists interviewed in Bologna in 2019 negotiate gendered language in their everyday lives and in their activism. Themes mentioned by the activists include how language constructs reality, both in its current restriction of possibilities and in its opportunities to change society; a delimitation of the different strategies used by activists to attempt to be more inclusive, including their preferences for and arguments against different approaches; and how activists perceive other people’s reactions to the use of both gendered language and the strategies used to counteract it. Underlying all of these themes is an awareness that the use of gendered and gender-inclusive language has powerful political implications.