In-Person
Grammatical gender—a system of classifying nouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter—has long been the bane of language learners. That in German “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has” led Mark Twain to lament “the awful German language.” But for 19th-century German linguists, grammatical gender was not capricious or irrational, but rather a deeply meaningful structure that provided insight into cultural norms and primitive forefathers. This session provides an overview of theories of grammatical gender from this period and explores how they centered on a fundamental question: Is it possible to imagine “the human” as unsexed?