Abstrakt
The aim of this conference paper is the proposal of looking at the degendering linguistic praxis, an active usage of gender neutral pronouns (they/them, or neologistic e.g. thon, hu, xe, sie) and gender neutral descriptions (such as menstruating person, pregnant people etc.) in the light of an approach called everyday prefiguration, where we define prefigurative politics as "deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here-and-now" (Raekstad & Gradin 2020) and everyday as such an implementation, which takes place on everyday basis and micropolitical level. Linguistic degendering can be a part of the strategy used by gender abolitionists, who aim for a society freed from gender roles.
Radical gender scholars, such as Judith Butler, say that gender is primarily an oppression tool, rather than an inherent identity. Similar thought can be found within the works of trans feminist scholars, such as Talia Mae Bettcher, who debunk the idea of the "feminine essence", or the theory of "being trapped in the wrong body" and map out how the gender binary is harmful for a plethora of individuals.
These ideas put into (prefigurative) practice may be found in far-left, anarchist and socialist communities online, mainly on Twitter and Tumblr, just as well as in the academic sphere, where for example Dembroff & Wodak (2018) argue for using exclusively gender neutral pronouns in academic papers to protect the privacy of mentioned scholars, to fight essentialism, and to make the academic world inclusive. This paper analyses whether such a practice can be labeled as prefigurative and whether it can ward off the common arguments against prefiguration itself, e.g. not being based on in-depth analysis of the structural problem that it is trying to solve, or even worsening the problem itself.