Jean Viard, sociologist, research director at CNRS, returns today in Social issue on a controversial addition in the online version of the Le Robert dictionary. A new gender-neutral pronoun: “IEL”. The Minister of National Education. Jean-Michel Blanquer, disapproves, the former French teacher, Brigitte Macron too. Le Robert, for his part, defends this addition.
franceinfo: What do you think, Jean Viard, of this new pronoun?
Jean Viard: I think there is a minority that does not want to define itself in relation to the masculine and the feminine, that exists, a minority. It has not been respected historically. It was denied. It’s a few% of the population, but it’s true that they were denied, so recognizing them is something positive and giving them rights, etc. It is also indeed debates on the word, debates on mixed toilets, etc. So that I recognize. But afterwards, it’s a bit like the right to vote at 16, it is subjects that appear, carried by very urban minorities, are these really subjects that carry meaning in our societies?
And I tend to think that basically, we have abandoned working-class circles, we have seen with the crisis of the yellow vests, the feeling of abandonment in which they were. We can see that the issue of the suburbs, we talk about it almost more while the situation is extremely harsh, especially with all the drug problems happening there, etc. And basically, haven’t we abandoned social questions for, indeed, respectable questions, and I recognize them as such, but which, somewhere, are micro questions? It’s kind of the concern that drives me when I see these discussions.
Can these different fights not be waged head-on?
If we could, no doubt. But in fact, that is not what is happening. So that’s what’s complicated. In fact, we could, but it is also because the milieus have moved away, that the working-class milieus have moved to the urban outskirts or to districts that the people who occupy the world of the public arena, know little about. So there is a gap.
Before, there was the Communist Party, there were union structures, there were major popular education movements that forged links between different worlds, teachers went to teach in underprivileged areas, etc. it was true for sports too. The sports teachers were generally volunteers on weekends and evenings, to train young people, etc. And all these links have come apart a lot and so, basically, we have moved away from each other, I think, and that’s also what I hear.
That’s why all this enlightens me a bit about a society in an archipelago, to use the now well-known expression, which poses problems for me, because what will unite? What do we get together on? I’m not saying that to say we must not respect small minorities, we must respect them. And after all, why not give them a new right in terms of spelling. But the basic question is how do we come together; and how we do not highlight every time what separates us.
And on a symbolic level, what does it represent to have this pronoun “IEL” which enters the online version of the Le Robert dictionary, but in the Le Robert dictionary, all the same?
Yes, but of course it has a certain weight. It is not a decision, I was going to say of the French Academy, but it is not a directly political decision, but it is a will which comes from elsewhere in the United States, to respect all that is hyper differentiated, anything that is hyper gendered, etc. And that’s why, I don’t want to criticize either in the sense that they are suffering minorities. It deserves respect and attention and affection, I would say.
But then, indeed, we cut the company into micro slices. And this micro-cut society, we will say it does not have an extremely strong common, and we can clearly see it in the difficulty we have in talking to each other, in talking politics, etc. the ones with the others. We are in a society, one could say cut off, and that worries me. We have to keep an “us” that makes us come together and that we do not just make small chapels next to each other. For now, I would say that what brings together is weaker than what separates.