Few additions to French-language dictionaries have created as much controversy as the 2021 addition of the pronoun “iel” in the digital version of the Robert. Every year, “new” words are added to the lexical repertoire of all the standardized languages that are the subject of dictionaries. Moreover, these words are nothing new: they have been coming out of people’s mouths and have been circulating in the social space for a long time. The norm is actually years behind usage (and not the other way around), and people aren’t necessarily waiting for a word to magically appear in the French elite’s dictionary to name the changing world. around them, and to name themselves.
This outcry is due to the fact that the pronoun “iel” forces a crack both in the French language and in the gender binary, since it is the entire grammatical system, itself based on the feminine/ masculine, which he questions. Beyond symbolizing linguistic change, the pronoun makes visible people who do not identify as either male or female, or in between, or both, which many people find difficult to conceive. The pronoun iel in fact signals a disidentification vis-à-vis the dominant identities (the mutually exclusive categories of man/woman) which does not however aspire to forge a new fixed identity.
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Such disidentification is destabilizing. We tend to believe that the identity categories (sexual or linguistic) that define us are natural, that they arise from the normal order of things. Most people identify with pre-determined categories, already available, which will later dictate, to varying degrees, their life possibilities. The pronoun iel therefore represents for some a loss of bearings, since it points to new possibilities beyond what is generally (recognized), familiar and allowed.
Language, a national affair
The French language, in all its normativity, its academicity and its monolithism is straight. The people who defend it against what they present as external threats reserve no room for deviance, exploration, novelty; the objective would be to preserve French, which insinuates that it exists in a canonical, ancient and pure, even natural state. However, the French language, like other national and standardized languages, is a social construction, solidified in the 19e century with the emergence of the capitalist nation-state in Europe to serve as its unifying pillar. What is now called a “language” is in truth a collection of otherwise disparate linguistic forms that we have throughout history fixed, homogenized, repatriated under the same flag: English, Italian, French. Anything that falls outside the limits thus constructed—the pronoun iel and the problems of agreement it raises, but also Anglicisms, spelling errors, foreign accents—therefore appears as a threat to homogeneity (ethno )linguistics of the nation.
The pronoun iel figures twice as a threat to the nation because, in addition to transgressing the linguistic norm, it upsets the heteronormative and patriarchal order by evoking new gender identities and new sexualities that break with the nuclear family and its functions. reproductive. The increased visibility of these identities and sexualities, including in language, reveals the constructed, flexible and artificial nature of the gender binary and the categories that derive from it (male/female, straightt/gay). “Iel” is therefore a doubly thorny problem for the nation: iel corrupts French and participates in the erosion of the communication tool that unites its members, and iel endangers its reproduction by threatening its birth rate. Reactions to the pronoun iel thus aim to protect the status quo on two fronts: linguistic normativity and sexual normativity.
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When voices are raised against the pronoun iel, when we are told that its inclusion in Robert online is “destroying our values” and will result in a “defiled” language, what we are told is that the pronoun (and what it represents) erodes national values ( read: heteropatriarchal). And you know what? It’s true: the queer revolution wants to see sexual, national and linguistic borders fall. The queer revolution wants to destroy so-called national values, because queer communities regularly suffer the violence of these values. The queer revolution recognizes that it is incompatible with the nation and actively works to create a world on the fringes of it rather than seeking to carve out a place for itself in it. To live queer, to do queer, is to disinvest the forms recognized by the State, the goal being to always produce forms, discourses, lives that power will be unable to recognize and prioritize, including in the arena of language.
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