In this seminar, I discuss the phenomenon popularly known in Brazil as “neutral language”, a linguistic strategy proposed and disseminated by non-binary people whose aim is to question the binary organisation of the gender order. However, the discourse of common sense, the media, the conservative political field and even certain areas of Brazilian linguistic science perpetuate caricatures and stereotypes about this phenomenon (and the community to which it is linked), because they start from the erroneous idea that it is an attempt foreign to the language to add a grammatical “third gender” to Brazilian Portuguese.

This understanding is largely due to the invisibilisation of non-binary people in both public and academic debate. Based on a multi-sited ethnography and a corpus composed of data from social networks, fieldwork in an LGBTQ+ collective and interviews with non-binary people, I argue empirically that “neutral language” presents much bolder challenges than simply adding new forms to the linguistic system.

To this end, the seminar will have three distinct parts that complement each other. The first part will focus on definitions and concepts central to the debate on language activism and inclusion through language. The second part traces a brief genealogy of politicised attempts to make the language system more inclusive. In the third and final part, the aim is to use empirical data from research into similar phenomena in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese to dispel misunderstandings about “neutral language” and gender non-binarity, which are commonly used by the conservative camp to provoke moral panics in the population about the supposed destruction of the family and the nation.

This activity takes place as part of the Gender, Language and Communication Seminar of the Doctoral Programme in Feminist Studies.

Bio note

Rodrigo Borba is a professor in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme in Applied Linguistics (PIPGLA) and the Department of Anglo-Germanic Languages at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He has been a visiting researcher at King's College London, the University of Birmingham and the University of Oxford. His research investigates the relationships between language, gender and sexuality in various applied contexts. He has dozens of national and international publications. Among them are the books O (Des)aprendizado de si: transexualidades, interação e cuidado em saúde (Fiocruz 2016) and Discursos transviados: por uma linguística queer (Cortez 2020). He is editor of the journal Gender and Language.

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