Uneffing the Binary

Megan and Carrie talk with Drs Kris Aric Knisley and Eric Louis Russell about their book Redoing linguistic worlds: Unmaking gender binaries, remaking gender pluralities, gender, critical linguistics, trans linguistics, and uneffing all things.

• Sperm Whale "phonetic alphabet"

Transcript

Megan Figueroa: Hi, welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. 

Carrie Gillon: I'm Carrie Gillon.  

Megan: And I'm Megan Figueroa. Carrie, someone called us insufferable twits.  

Carrie: Sure did. 

Megan: On the internet.  

Carrie: On the interwebs. 

Megan: We don't get a lot of actual reviews, which, if you do like us, you should totally give us a positive review, because when we do get reviews, they seem to be calling us names. 

Carrie: Most of them are good, but we do have a few that are bad. Normally, if it's a one-star review, I add it to our list because I like showing off who we do not appeal to. But unfortunately, this was a two-star.  

Megan: Yeah, oddly, a two-star review from a woman.

Carrie: What looks like a woman anyway; the name makes it look like a woman.  

Megan: I was a little bit surprised because I was thinking, well, women can be misogynist, too. But I was thinking you would not call two male podcast hosts insufferable twits.  

Carrie: Probably not. No.

Megan: It's frustrating.  

Carrie: Yeah, it's not nice. You can give a bad review if you don't like something, that's fine. But calling names is not good. I also thought the main complaint—that we're not historians—was deeply unfair.  Especially since it was something we were obviously just like, "Maybe this is what's going on." We did not make the claim that it was.  

Megan: Right. Well, yes, saying they said that we aren't serious people despite our credentials. I'm like, "What?"

Carrie: First of all, I've never aimed to be serious. You're talking to the wrong person if you want to hurt me that way.  

Megan: Exactly. I admit it stung a little bit to be called insufferable twits, but not the actual bad name being called. But it's so frustrating to be a woman in this arena and our character being attacked. It seems like when there's a bad review, it has to involve some sort of character assassination.  

Carrie: Yeah. For me, I don't care. You're going to call me a bad name? You can call me a bad name.  
To me, that reflects more on you than it does on me. But I was a little hurt that it was like, "Oh, you don't know anything about history," which, you know what? Fair. I don't.  

Megan: Yeah, fair. Me neither. 

Carrie: So that actually did sting a little. But then I thought about it, and I'm like, "I've never claimed to be a historian. I've never claimed to be an expert in that area." [inaudible] back.

Megan: Whatever. I actually had to look the word "twit". I've never heard it before.  

Carrie: What? How is that possible?  

Megan: I don't know. I just didn't know what it meant. It's a new word for me. Thank you to that person for introducing a new word to my vocabulary.  

Carrie: Well, actually, I'm not sure if we can say "new vocabulary"—but speaking of new areas of language.  

Megan: That's exciting.  

Carrie: Caveat. This is very early research, and I have no idea if it's going to end up being real. But it's kind of cool that it might.  

Megan: I love a caveat like that.  

Carrie: Well, so supposedly, scientists have discovered a "phonetic alphabet" that is used by sperm whales.  

Megan: That is really neat.  

Carrie: Yeah, I always kind of had this suspicion that if any animals were going to be proven to have something that was close to human language, it would be whales.  

Megan: Yeah, totally. I might [inaudible] with you.  

Carrie: They used artificial intelligence to spot patterns, and that supposedly helped them uncover the building blocks of whale language. They communicate by a series of rapid clicks. 

[rapid clicks sound playing]

Carrie: NPR's Lauren Sommer describes this as a combination of Morse code and popcorn popping which is kind of a nice description.  

Megan: Yeah, I can exactly imagine that. 
 
Carrie: We've all heard whale sounds. We've all heard, the clicking and the popping. And then we've also heard whale song, especially in a Star Trek movie.  

Megan: I don't understand that reference, since I haven't seen any Star Trek in my life.  

Carrie: What? How could you not have seen 'Star Trek 4,' the one where they go to San Francisco and rescue a whale to save the future?  

Megan: Wow, that's the plot?  

Carrie: Basically. Sorry, in the 80s-era San Francisco. It's a ludicrous plot, but I loved that movie so much when I was a kid. This research project is called 'Project CETI,' C-E-T-I, which stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative. And it's also very similar to the other CETI, just looking for aliens out in space. I just love that.  

Megan: Yeah, that's perfect.  

Carrie: They recorded 400 sperm whales in the Eastern Caribbean between 2005 and 2018.  

Megan: Oh my gosh, good for them.  

Carrie: They managed to get 60 individuals—, or approximately 60 individuals. So not all 400, but still, it's really cool. They have these series of rapid-fire clicks, and researchers have called them codas. They can consist of between 3 and 40 clicks.  
Megan: Oh, wow. That's a huge difference.  

Carrie: Yeah, it's weird. And then also, not just the number, but also the tempo.  

Megan: Okay, so they're paying attention. The tempo will be different?  

Carrie: Yeah, they call this—the speed, or the tempo—'rubato.' And then sometimes there's an extra click at the end of a coda, which they call ornamentation.  

Megan: Ornamentation, I love that.  

Carrie: Apparently there are 156 codas, each with its own rubato, ornamentation, tempo, and rhythm.  
 
Megan: That's quite the system.  

Carrie: They think it's something to do with a combination that makes meaning. And they're not really sure if it's syllables, words, or sentences.

Megan: I guess that would be the question, wouldn't it?  

Carrie: It would be. We haven't figured out anything. Without meaning, I don't know how much you can figure out.  

Megan: That is remarkable. That is really neat.  

Carrie: It is really cool.

Megan: It's very human, and language-like to have a phonetic alphabet.  

Carrie: Well, we don't know if it is a phonetic alphabet, but yes.  

Megan: If it were like the phonetic alphabet that we have.  

Carrie: Yeah, very human-like. And so, if they have this set of symbols—which seems like they do—and then those symbols are matched to meaning, then we've got something very close to human language.  

Megan: I don't know how they're going to find out if they match to meaning. I don't know if that's possible.  

Carrie: I have no idea.  

Megan: It's remarkable that they've come this far, so who knows what they can do.  
Carrie: Yes. It would be really awesome if they could get closer to cracking the code or whatever.  

Megan: It would be really cool.  

Carrie: Yeah, I was just really excited about that. There's a bunch of articles about it, but I'll post the Smithsonian Magazine's version of it. It's nice.  

Megan: Very cool. That is so much more lovely than being called an insufferable twit. Learning about sperm whales and their language.  

Carrie: And their potential language, yeah. I'm excited. I'm excited because I still strongly suspect that there is something there. I don't know, what's the word that people use for AI? Hallucination. AI can often hallucinate things. So this, to me, though, seems like a proper use of AI that may be less prone to such things, but I don't know. We'll see.  

Megan: Yeah, we'll see. Well, maybe one day we'll be speaking to sperm whales.  

Carrie: That would be so cool.  

Megan: Yeah, it would be so cool.  

Carrie: Anyway, today's episode is very interesting. We talk about gendered systems of language. It's really fun.  

Megan: Yeah, enjoy.  

Carrie: Enjoy.  

Today, we're very excited to have Dr. Kris Aric Knisely, who is an Assistant Professor of French and Intercultural Competence in the Department of French and Italian, and affiliated faculty in the second language acquisition and teaching PhD program and the Trans Studies Research Cluster at the University of Arizona. Kris's research focuses on gender justice in language education and research. Eric Louis Russell is a Professor in the Department of French and Italian, Affiliated in the Departments of Linguistics and Gender, Sexualities, and Women's Studies at the University of California, Davis. Eric is a critical linguist whose research focuses on gender and masculinities, sexualities, animus and power. We have both of them here today to talk about their edited volume called "Redoing Linguistic Worlds: Unmaking Gender Binaries, Remaking Gender Pluralities." So, welcome.

Megan Figueroa: Welcome.

Eric Louis Russell: Thank you. 

Kris Aric Knisely: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Eric: Wonderful to be here. 

Megan: So happy you're here.

Carrie: Yeah, I've been meaning to have Kris on because I wanted to talk about, like, French gender, so this is especially exciting. Yeah, first question, why did you want to edit this book and why now?

Eric: Kris, why don't you start? 

Kris: You want me to start? Okay.

Eric: Yeah.

Kris: As we look at each other...

Eric: [crosstalk] better historicity of it all,

Kris: I think Eric and I started talking about this book. I think we dated it back about a decade now.

Eric: Yeah, more or less. 

Megan: Wow. 

Kris: When we were at the Lavender Languages Conference, one of the last ones that was held in DC, I was just a little grad student. Eric likes to say that he had a lot less gray hair then.

Eric: Indeed, I actually did have a lot less gray hair. 

Kris: A whole, like, trans approach to linguistics was really starting to bubble up. Wiley's work was coming through. We were starting to tangle a little bit with what's this relationship between trans thinking about language and queer linguistics, and how does all this fit together? Eric and I are going, "Everything's happening in English." 

Carrie: Yeah.

Kris: Great. Good. We need work, but we're also going "We both work on French and nothing's here."

Eric: Yeah, it was not just about English, but it was also in English from a very anglophone perspective. I don't know. I think we both have a bit of an idea, or that's a nice way of saying it, that we should challenge that, right? Some of it is challenging the hegemony of English and the anglophone world in the linguistics communities.

Carrie: Yes.

Kris: Yeah. 

Eric: Then, Kris...

Kris: Yeah, and then from there, it was really a conversation about things happening with language, sort of within or around the periphery or the communities that we participate in, and how do we start to have this conversation professionally that's already sort of happening in these communities where people are languaging in ways that don't conform to these really rigid binary conceptions of what gender is, what language is.

Eric: Yeah. 

Kris: How do we do these things? So, you want to keep...

Eric: Yeah, I think it was really important. I work in both French and Italian as well as a couple of other, Dutch or Flemish rather. What I found really interesting was that I kept coming back to the question of perspective and how it was just a very anglophone perspective on what might be happening and what was happening. Just even the questions that could be asked about other languages and cultural communities. So it was just really fortunate. Kris and I, in some ways we're very different, in some ways we're also very, very complimentary. We just fell into this teamwork. We had several hurdles that we had to...

Carrie: Always.

Eric: Not the least which, of course, is just academia itself, right? But it's actually been really interesting, and to hit on your question of why now. I think it's even more important now because of the other voices perhaps that are getting too much, in my opinion, play around the world, but in linguacultural communities and then particularly within academic linguacultural communities. I think it's just really important that we were able to create some space for some other voices. We had tremendous contributors too. I mean, we have to shout out to them. We edited this. We have a couple of chapters that we wrote together as well as individually, but our contributors really are a hugely important part of this. 

Kris: Yeah, I think Eric and I talk a lot about like, wanting to sort of push the conversation forward. This book really comes at a time when trans approaches to linguistics are starting to go beyond these sort of three or four people, right? 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: Sure.

Kris: All talking to each other. 

Carrie: Yeah.

Kris: It's starting to be something that a lot of grad students are interested in and don't have mentors for, I think you had Kirby.

Carrie: Yeah. 

Kris: Kirby Conrod was on the podcast at some point, and if I'm not mistaken, it was with you all that they were talking about. There aren't trans people in secure positions with these areas of expertise to mentor people. 

Carrie: Right.

Kris: I think that was another big thing for Eric and I about why now is we need to have this conversation because otherwise, without any sort of meaningful engagement with how language actually functions, what language actually is, the broader public is having, not this conversation, but they think they're having this conversation.

Eric: Absolutely. Yeah.

Kris: We would do well to have this conversation with the broader public and bring what we have to offer as scholars of language to it. Then, we're looking at all, like, I get a lot of emails from grad students saying, "Hey, can you be on my committee?" Eric and I are going, "We have to think of better mechanisms to try to get this conversation together to make there be something concrete and tangible that we can say, "Awesome, you're interested in this. Grab this book, read this work by these people." You know what we're going to do? We'll just tease it right on the front end. We're going to do another iteration of this volume. 

Eric: Yeah, [crosstalk]

Carrie: Oh.

Kris: We're going to do workshops to try to get you involved. So Eric and I are headed to the Lavender Languages Conference. It's this August, right, Eric?

Eric: It's in August, yeah.

Kris: In August... 

Eric: In Brighton, in the UK.

Kris: Yeah. 

Carrie: Nice.

Kris: We'll also do a virtual version, just trying to say, "Come be a part of the conversation."

Eric: Yeah. 

Kris: We really mean what we say in the conclusion, but question us.

Eric: Yeah.

Kris: Question everybody who wrote this volume, question everybody's thinking about this. Then, come tell us all the ways that we're wrong and we're old and we missed, the things that you know about and the things that you do in your languaging communities, and how do we make this more expansive, more participatory?

Eric: Even, not to say, I like what Kris is saying here too, and I like that we've led with, we're already thinking of the next step. It's not necessarily that we're wrong, but no one person, no one community can see everything there. There are 8 billion people on the planet. So there are potentially 8 billion different perspectives on this. I think what Kris was also hitting on this. Like, what we noticed is, that a lot of the folks doing this type of work involved in participating in these linguacultural communities, languaging in these new ways and confronting also the pushback on this languaging are folks that are in less secure positions than us. They're younger in their career. They're perhaps in policies and in situations that are less amenable to doing this work. So, we're really making a commitment to building in mentoring to the next stages and building in also spaces. We had several contributors that were interested in the first volume. Well, the first and only one that's out, but I'm already very optimistically referring to this as the first one, right?

Carrie: You're already thinking about the [crosstalk], yeah. 

Eric: For a lot of reasons, were not able to complete something to be a part of it. Now, that we've seen how this plays out and how it works, we'd like to step into that as well. We'd also like to move past, like, I think it was a really important step that we move past anglophone linguacultural spaces, but we're still very much in the Global North, we're in languages that are widely studied, that are widely resourced in terms of positions in academia, French, German, Spanish, and Italian. I'm really excited about the possibilities of moving past these spaces. Not because they're unimportant, but because there's so much else going on out there in the past, in the present, and in the futurity. I think that's really important too, that this book opens up a space, but it's not the only opening. Maybe the first step is opening things and giving voice to other folks out there and other communities.

Megan: I appreciate... Oh, go ahead, Carrie.

Carrie: I think it makes sense to start with languages that people do at least have some familiarity with. Like, if I were to like, throw Squamish at them, what are they going to do with this information, right? 

Megan: Yeah.

Eric: Can I just say, "Please throw Squamish at us."  We already recruit you for participation of [crosstalk]. This is...

Carrie: I can tell you.

Eric: I'm the practical one that's not afraid to ask those questions. 

Carrie: I can tell you like, "How the gender system works? I mean, there is a gender system, it's marked on the determiners and the demonstratives. They call them masculine and feminine, but really the masculine ones are unmarked, and then the feminine ones are used for human females, and animal females. Well, less so in Squamish, but in some related languages, things like canoes. Yeah, things like that.

Eric: Interesting. Okay.

Carrie: Yeah.

Eric: There are all sorts of interesting, like, we're talking here about, of course, the manifestation of that which people call gender, which is a tricky term in and of itself, right? 

Carrie: Yeah.

Eric: Our use of "it comes" from Latin, which just means "type," right? Like, gayness just means "type." So their languages, when I teach this to undergrads, I often say, 36 because it seems like that's my base number for throwing out a random thing. But there are lots of ways of cutting up experience and putting it into typologies that needn't have anything to do with that, which in our society we refer to as gender. The projection of identity that has, for many, many people is conflated with biological sex or sex characteristics. There are lots of other ways of doing this in many, many languages in the world. I think that's also one thing that we need to keep in mind. Like, these folks are redoing their linguistic worlds, but also in a way, there's nothing new about this in the history of humanity. Also, if we look just even across humanity at one particular time, say right now in 2024, there's nothing particularly unusual about challenging typing of experience, and particularly the people in the experience, right? Though it is fascinating that canoes would be typed in that way. Sometimes, these things are just artifactual. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Eric: But I wouldn't dare speculate on that. I work [crosstalk] dramatic.

Carrie: Yeah, I think it has something to do with the importance of them, yeah. Anyway, it is still complicated. 

Kris: Can that be my response to every question for the rest of this discussion? It's complicated.

Megan: It's complicated. Yeah.

Kris: Even as Eric is talking about how we sort of are mapping these social constructs onto the ways that we're doing language and the relationship between this concept of social gender, and then these grammatical and lexical and other forms, that's the first thing my brain does. We've made a mess of it, right? We're as humans, we've made it wildly messy. It could be very simply gridded out, right? We do love to do that. That's what our brains do. We create these categories and we remix these categories, and then we try to decide. Apparently, it's Kirby Conrod's shoutout day. 

Carrie: I love that.

Kris: I love thinking with the way that they talk about like what social gender is and we sort of riff on that in the book. It's these groupings of roles, practices, and identities into sort of, "This is like that." Then, they get filtered into these legible categories, and then people position themselves within and against the categories that they're aware. They do all of this with language, sometimes with the noun classes or other things we're calling gender in language and sometimes in ways that has absolutely nothing to do with that. 

Eric: Yeah. I mean, what Kris is referring to is some ways I talk about this, particularly with students who don't have a much of a background in linguistics or language study is here we are. We're humans. We put things in boxes. This is what we do. But we tend to take it for granted that those boxes are our creation, right? Maybe not individual creation. They're sort of our collective creation. They're our inheritance because the creations are hoisted upon us. Maybe it's inevitable that we put things in boxes, but the boxes themselves and the distribution of those boxes and the importance of those boxes is entirely uncultured, right? It's something that we're constantly doing. This is a point that Kris and I really felt like we had to make early on in the book and break down some ways that people talk about language.

It's become a bit of like, in Tagalog, "Iba tayo dyan"  for me, like this sort of, I don't know what that is in English. Sort of like my theme thing that I bring up every time I talk about things like language isn't a noun, it's a verb. It's something we do. It doesn't exist. It's something that predicates, right? It allows us to be in relation to commune with others, right? To be in common with others. But we act as if it were, and we do this all the time, day in and day out. We do that, I think, and it decenters the human, it decenters the people both as agents and as recipients of this action. It sort of creates this sort of meta-hegemony, right? Where it just sort of naturalizes and in visualizes itself, where we'll see people saying like, "Well, you just can't do that because French doesn't have this."

We decided on an example of, is it Macron? Who's the wife of the current president of France saying like, "There's El and Al, and that's enough." That's the way the French language works. I cite some people in Italy saying the same thing. We hear this time and time again, right? If we flip that script and we say, "Well, language doesn't exist." Like, it doesn't have things, it doesn't do things. People do things. People do things through languaging in lots of ways, by speaking, by typing, by reading, by thinking. Because we think in language, we ideate in language, we imagine in language, and so forth and so on. That allows us to step into this and say like, "Well, of course, there are these boxes, but the boxes are ephemeral." Like, the boxes are not, like, doing what you think they are and they can move. We have so many boxes in life, right? We have people who are gray-haired and red-haired and bald and so forth. Those are boxes, but that we don't give them the weight that we give other things. 

Well, I suppose maybe some people do say that out loud, but like, obviously that's not a shared construct. And I think that's really helpful way of us stepping into this because we're also in conversation. A book is a conversation. We're in conversation with an audience that is deeply engaged in this type of work, both as activists and as intellectuals. But we're also engaged in people who are just sort of exploring and wondering or are being forced to read this because it's course material or what have you, or they heard this podcast and now they're fascinated with it. I think it's really important that we kind of start there and say like, "This is what we think language is." That sets the basis for how we then do a lot of, is it Kris, would you say? Is it flipping scripts or is it just like throwing them up in the air and saying like, "Hey..."

Carrie: She kicks the table.

Eric: Yeah.

Kris: Some of them were flipping, some of them were unscripting.

Eric: Some of them were just in other classes and other work I do on taboo language, I would say they're effing the script. I might actually articulate that out loud with other podcasts. 

Kris: In our conclusion, we're calling BS on the script in so many words.

Megan: You can swear fully on this podcast. 

Carrie: You can fully swear.

Megan: Yeah.

Eric: Oh, wonderful.

Carrie: I love that you swear in your paper, Eric.

Kris: That our entire conclusion is...

Eric: Oh, yeah. I mean, and also just on [crosstalk] bar, shout out to our editors. They never batted an eyelash on that.

Megan: [crosstalk] That's amazing. 

Eric: Even our editors stood by us. After reviews came in and we thought, we had a moment of reflection, I think Kris and I did. We said, and I'm probably the one that said, "Well, fuck this, of course, we're going to keep this in there. This is important because we're also speaking to a linguistic community." 

Megan: Yeah. 

Eric: A community of scholars, by that I mean. I think it's really important that we shake things up. 

Kris: I think our conclusion and the vulgarity through which we write our conclusion is very much serving a purpose. That's what we came to, is that, see, language does something.

Carrie: Yeah.

Eric: I think we even said that.

Kris: You perhaps are angry about the language that we've chosen, but yes, we absolutely wrote that.

Eric: That was the easiest thing we wrote. I think I was still on sabbatical and [inaudible] and we're doing this back and forth by a box. I'm fairly certain because I am very fast and loose with vulgarity. I teach a class on taboo language. I have a book that just came out. 

Carrie: I love it.

Eric: Very, very bad language practices. Or that which is judged to be very bad, I should say, the way I try to have my students articulate it. So I think I said like, "Oh, fuck this." Of course, we're bullshit. Just bullshit on all of this. Bullshit on the over-hyper saliency of gender, but also on people dismissing gender, and bullshit on the fact, of course, language can't harm you, but people use language to harm people all the time. 

Carrie: Oh, yes. 

Eric: It feels like language is harming you and bullshit on people dismissing that. 

Megan: Yeah.

Eric: Bullshit on these people who will say things like, "I've never had to use like, [foreign language]. I've never had to use an Italian. There's a debate right now around the use of schwa, a non-traditionally gendered morphine marker. They'll say like, [foreign language] How dare you make me do this? I think, "Well, how dare I make you use my name? How dare I make you pronounce my name in a certain way?" 

Carrie: Yeah.

Eric: You would laugh at me, if anyone said like, "Oh, no, I want to refer to you as Amy, or some other name." I'm like, "No, of course." Right? 

Carrie: Yeah.

Eric: You might think my name is silly. You might think it's pretentious that I have two given names, but you call me by these names, right? So, bullshit on that. Honestly, I think we need to do more of that, and we hide behind a certain intellectualism, but these are real people. At the end of the day, it's people who matter. People in communities that matter and there are people in communities that are not being allowed to matter enough.

Carrie: Yes. I like that a lot. 

Megan: Absolutely. I like that too, yeah. 

Carrie: I have a question because I hadn't seen this before. What is a critical linguist?

Eric: Can I answer the way I really want to answer [crosstalk]? 

Carrie: Yes, of course.

Eric: Okay. 

Megan: Yes. 

Eric: I think any sort of critical theories are fucking with that, which other people, particularly people with more entrenched access to power and authority. It is fucking with that which they would rather have unfucked with. 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Megan: Yeah.

Eric: That is the best way I can articulate this. Also, in one of my grad seminars and my students were so delightful, they even made this lovely poster for me because I have this slogan where I'm like, "We fuck with the patriarchy because the patriarchy isn't going to fuck itself." 

Carrie: Right.

Eric: I think that's what a critical linguist does. A critical linguist, much like anyone working on any critical theory, identifies a problem, defines that problem, and then steps into it and tries to peel back the layers and look at the dynamic. I tend to think in Gramsci terms. So I think, hegemony and power structures and dynamics of coercion and consent and so forth and so on, and how this becomes naturalized such that people don't even see it, let alone question it. I think a critical language steps into that dynamic and basically talks with it and basically says, "You know what? No one is asking a question about this." Everyone thinks this is inevitable. Or that is just the way, the gods or evolution or science or something has made this situation and says, "We are going to ask questions about that." It doesn't mean we full on dismiss everything, but we bring into the light of questioning into interrogation that which is usually like taken aside and said like, "No, there are no questions to ask about this."

That's what critical language does. Of course, looking at languaging and looking at like, all sorts of aspects of it, just as a critical theorist and say, economics or sociology or anthropology or any of these other disciplines and literary studies and art would do the same thing. There aren't that many folks using that term, though. There is critical discourse studies. That is sort of a corner of it that is like, as some folks are using this term is the place where it's taken the most roots. I think another like queer linguistics, feminist linguistics are spaces where you see people who define themselves as critical thinkers. They just don't always say they're critical linguists, but that's what they're doing, right? 

Carrie: Mm-hmm.

Kris: I'm really glad you asked that, Carrie, too, because I didn't even realize, Eric, that this is something you and I have in common. I maybe known for being slightly on the verbose side, Eric, you can very politely or less politely agree that much of Eric's job was going. Yeah, okay. You had one thought in those three pages, so maybe we can make that into one paragraph. Every time I went on, Eric, "You're right." I don't tend to be condensed, but when people get asking me for bios, I write half a page and then I go, "No one wants to read that much about me. How can I make it two sentences?" Critical is always the work that gets cut off there. But I didn't realize that you and I both sort of think through that lens. Because I would describe myself regularly as a critical applied linguist. That's often how I sort of describe myself to my grad students when they're like, "What are you. I'm like that." Okay, let's say I'm a critical applied linguist or a critical applied socio-linguist, something like that, right? For me, I love that you were talking about sort of the questioning. Because if you had asked me the same thing, I'd probably in much more polite words because I still feel the pull. I'm waiting to advance in my career and feel no pull and be the same on and off the recording.

Eric: I have gotten to the point where Kris knows this.

Carrie: Give a shit, right? 

Eric: Oh, I don't fucking care.

Kris: Look, I wrote that chapter with you.

Eric: Yeah.

Kris: Also, I experienced it as the greatest therapy writing of my life. For me, I always talk about it in terms of the pedagogical approach to the rest of problematizing, right? This constantly sits back and asks, what is the status quo? Why is it this way? Who benefits? Who's marginalized about it? What alternatives exist? How is this happening through language? Right? All of these critical questions that I pass around to my students, and I'm like, "Here, tuck this non-bookmark bookmark in your book because these are the questions I'm going to be asking you every single day."

Eric: Yeah. 

Kris: Soon you go rattle them off like I do.

Eric: I find myself with students. One of the great joys of my professional career is teaching a class that is for non-humanities, non-language, non-linguistic students. It's the class on bad language that I teach usually about once a year. They're very often STEM students. UC Davis is a very STEM-focused campus. One of the things I lead with them is, I say a couple of things. One, I tell them like, "You're biased and you'll always be biased." They're very well-intentioned, right? They believe they can perhaps achieve the nirvana of being unbiased someday. We talk about how to hold that intention. Then, I also tell them like, "Your answers are after good and they come up." But really, this is work of asking questions, like being a critical thinker, being a critical linguist, being a critical scholar is really just, as Kris is saying, like it is just like fearlessly asking the next question when someone gives you an answer and do it better, right?

That's what ideally theory serves for, to help us better ask questions rather than to provide answers. That is something that I probably would make some of my colleagues' heads explode. But I really do think that's the work that we do. There are all sorts of questions that Kris and I have not asked in this book, that we haven't even imagined both individually and together as we work. We just had a conversation the other day, and every time we do this, we go down these rabbit holes of talking. I think, gosh, I'd leave this conversation with like three or eight or something more questions than I had. Some of them are practical, and some of them are so large, they're those pleasurable questions that you know you'll never not wrestle with.

I think that's the heart of it for me is the fearless asking of questions and also calling, I mean, to go back to our conclusion, that is not a conclusion. How we tried to articulate that is calling bullshit on the finality of answers that are being offered by many people. Some of that has to be on our own discipline, our own fields as well as some of as we've talked about. I really wrestled with the hyper-salience of gender at the expense of other things as well. We see that with all sorts of questions in the language cultures that we participate in right now, it's my political correct way.

Kris: I think what we did too, Eric, is have a moment where we went, how normative and how, to use one of my favorite words, how CIS-lingual of us.

Eric: Yeah. 

Kris: To think about this has ever being something that we could write and write in its totality, right? If trans thinking gives us anything, it's the reminder that there's always infinite possibility that things can never be anything more than pinned down, right? Taking those ideas from queer linguistics and queer theory and thinking about them differently. I don't know where my brain is going. Isn't that the story of our lives?

Carrie: Yeah.

Eric: Yeah.

Megan: Yeah. 

Kris: Eric said something I asking questions. I definitely come up with questions, but yeah, just sort of not rushing into something that we don't have answers to and not looking to map out and write this forever existing grammar and rules for how this works. The whole point of a lot of these linguacultural communities is there doesn't have to be one way, there is not one way. Here are some ways. Pushing back against people who don't have a relationship to these communities wanting to come in and observe and say, "I've got it figured out. If only you do this, it's perfect." Or to borrow from Lau Simon's piece, my favorite title, I think the cis gay cis gays. 

Carrie: Yeah, it's good. 

Kris: From 2021 where he wrote about something that Eric and I have also been long wrestling women, which is people making comments about how XYZ way of doing it isn't creative enough, right? How binary of you to put "el" and "l" together in French and get yel. Well, guess what? We have to think about what that does in context and why that does work for some people. Maybe conceptually it works for some people. Conceptually it doesn't work for other people. That's the whole point, right? Then, there's a bit of safety to something that you can miss hear, right? 

Carrie: Yeah.

Kris: We have to think about how does that play out? 

Megan: Yeah. 

Kris: If someone can choose to ignore that I've languaged in a perhaps unexpected or non-cisnormative way, well, if someone violently responds what they think they heard, "Oh, no, I just said, "e" or ed," or whatever, right? There's a backpedal and there's the ability to sort of play through that interaction without potentially bringing harms to oneself.

Carrie: Yeah.

Kris: I think there are just factors that get missed when we try to pin down one solution, and it's going to be Kirby Conrod again. Kirby, if you're listening to this podcast someday, apparently, my brain loves playing little soundbites from you. Kirby talks about there's no shortage of pronouns at the pronouns store.

Carrie: Yeah.

Kris: I think that's something that we have to remember on even a broader scale than pronouns when we have languages that are doing gender in more ways. There's no shortage of ways of languaging at the language store, right? You can do all of these things and people have multiple pronouns, and people have multiple approaches. Shout out this time to Artemis Lopez. We do direct and indirect ways of trying to sort of communicate our worlds. Sometimes I'm going to use very specific, clearly non-binary ways of doing language and do these direct non-binary things. Other times I'm going to make indirect choices, whether that's because I need to use pseudo-normative ways to navigate the power structures and what people believe about my language and et cetera, or because maybe that's just what works best for me in that specific setting, in that specific moment, in my specific selfhood, et cetera. Please cut me off now because I'm going down the rabbit hole and it'll go for a long, long way.

Carrie: Okay. Go ahead, Megan. 

Megan: I wonder if you think you're really making it clear for me that we have a finality problem in linguistics where people want to a final answer. It's not linguistics, it's people.

Eric: No, it's not. 

Carrie: It's people.

Eric: Linguists are people too? I mean, sometimes we wonder.

Megan: We wonder.

Eric: Wait, what?

Megan: Breaking news.

Eric: Breaking news, yeah. We are still humans. I think it is a finality problem, and I think to come back to the analogy or the metaphoric way of understanding, like putting things in boxes. This just happens to be about one really, I refer to this as a really highly-ranking discourse. The discourse of gender identity that which gets conflated with biological sexual identity and a lot of people, right? People, we're aware of that even if we push against it. So this is just using that as a cover term. We're still part of this human condition where we want to have the boxes stable. Then, we also have institutional and sort of disciplinary practice pressures upon us. Kris and I know this very well, we have to be productive at a certain certain rate. Editors don't like journal articles and will not often publish them if they're just a series of questions that have like, tentative illusions but not definitive answers. 

If you think about the way we structure our work, it's introduction, description, interpretation, argumentation, and conclusion. There's not a lot of space for just sort of ambient questioning being the way, like, the true or truthy I suppose way we're doing things and what we're aiming for. Look, it's a book. It has a beginning and an end. It has a first page and a last page. We can't fully push against it, but I hope we model a different way, maybe being in our intellectual, our disciplinary, our professional worlds, as well as attending to how other people are doing worlds that are far more consequential than academia and far more consequential than linguistic publishing.

Kris: Yeah, I think that's part of what we call BS on too.

Eric: Yeah.

Kris: Yeah. BS on our own sort of self-importance. Eric and I were absolutely included in that.

Eric:  Absolutely.

Kris: Yes, what we bring just based on where we have been growing up and the rules that we've taken up, and all that. Yeah.

Carrie: I know this is late in the conversation, but what is gender?

Eric: Kris? 

Megan: It's complicated, right? You want me to...

Kris: It's complicated.

Eric: You do a much better job of answering this succinctly. I'll end up on the moon and back before we get there. So, take it away, Kris.

Kris: For us, in our book, we think about gender in two ways. The first of those being what most people think about when they think about gender, right? The social aspect of these social relational practices, roles, identities, positionalities, this messiness that we're doing, right? So we do shocker, we told you that language isn't a thing. Well, I'm also going to tell you that gender isn't a thing and they both are things, but they're also not things, right? If we're really talking about what it is, it's this constant doing, right? Not doing without memory, but I put out there my own practice, my own identities, and I try to position myself either as like, or different from other people in the ways that they're doing gender. 

It's this like messy nebulous of absolutely infinite categories that we then go. "For people who are listening to the audio, I'm making a scrunch-down box with my hands." Trying to just shove all of these particular positionalities and roles and ways of being in the world into this box and going, "Yep, that looks like a gender," right? I set up these various boxes and then other people go, "Hey, I sort of fit in that box." Or in the case of people in our book, they go, "Yeah, those boxes are nonsense. Let's keep reshuffling." You said I'd do this succinctly, Eric, you lied. 

Eric: You're doing it better than I would, right? But gender, just like language is a doing. Gender, like we're languaging, we're gendering. It's really nice that we have the gerundive form in English that we can do that, right? 

Kris: Yeah. 

Eric: It's hard to transliterate into other linguacultural practices, but it's a doing. 

Kris: Yeah, and then it's the social-relational doing that Kirby Conrod filters into legible categories that are infinite, but often we break down regularly into three men, women, non-binary people. Maybe we start to break things out more and we start thinking about, well, there are also agender people who are somewhere in this. We make all these boxes, right? Then, we get into gender identity, which is then like, how are we positioning ourselves vis-a-vis the boxes that we're aware of, right? Then, all of that gets communicated in gender expression, which comes down to these embodiments in languagements, all the social practices that allow us to sort of put gender out there. You're unsurprised perhaps that we say, "None of this exists before us or without us." There is no a priori gender. We've made this stuff up. We sometimes connect it to particular embodiments particular behaviors or particular positions. But all of that is constantly up for grabs and constantly up for redoing. Then, the second way that we really think about gender is what people talk about as grammatical gender or linguistic gender, right? These noun classes or however we might mark something that is related to social gender sometimes in our minds.

Eric: Also, very often not.

Kris: But also not.

Eric: In a complex tension because it allows us to sort of a cover story in a lot of ways. Because we are a large brain species, and we go through our lives, and we can't come. Of course, we've been talking about asking questions, but we can't constantly be asking these questions at every moment with every new stimulus, with every new experience, even if they're just with ourselves. We language to ourselves, we gender to ourselves, even when we're alone in a room, right? It takes on lots of forms. Yeah, this is where it becomes really complicated and messy because language can be a trap as much as liberation, or languaging can trap us as much as it can liberate us. Shout out to the poets, they're probably the ones who realize this on a more elegant and daily basis than those of us who are mere mortal linguists. 

I think what's fascinating too is that gender is also something that tell, like the way we do gender to ourselves and to others. This is a lot like all objects, right? When we observe what we think as objects and we make statements about them, whether it's about "gender" or about anything in the world, we're actually saying much more about ourselves than we are about that object. I think that's a really important thing to recognize about gender. When people are talking about gender, whether it's Kris and I or our contributors or anyone out there on different sides of the sociocultural, anthropological, and political spectrum, they're really saying things about themselves.

Carrie: Right.

Eric: When it came to gender, we tried to say like, "We want and, of course, we can't. We're trapped in this, right? That's humanity. But we want to both say something about our positionality and our disciplinary positionality, but also allow that to just be us, right? This is only Kris and Eric, or there's Kris's chapter, just Kris, mine is just mine, and so forth and so on. Not saying that that's the way it has to be sort of thinking about gender is a "truth" with a small "T." But just because it's your truth doesn't mean it's everyone's truth. None of us have access to the capital "T" to true. Am I doing it justice, Kris? 

Kris: Yeah. 

Eric: Sorry.

Kris: Yeah. No, I think there's something to it. 

Eric: Like philosophical beginnings come out.

Kris: Yeah, I think the way that I would wrap my brain around it is just this idea that gender is limitless and expansive. I think Eric would join me in arguing that it should be optional.

Carrie: Yeah. 

Eric: It doesn't feel like it. It doesn't...

Kris: It's made not optional by all means.

Eric: Right.

Kris: I think in this idyllic world, who cares about gender except if you care about gender, care about it as much as you want. That's sort of this tension, I think, in the way that we have to think if we're thinking with trans knowledge and all of these ways of doing gender and doing gender modality and doing language that say, it's limitless. There are things that we have in common, and there are things that we can talk about. If you don't want to do gender unto yourself, awesome, don't. If you do awesome, do, I think about Kobe Gordon who regularly is on the internet. It's like, "You want to do some hormones, just do some." That's how I feel about gender. Do you want to do some gender? Go for it. Don't want to do some gender, don't. Like, that's the world that we'd like to prefigure in many ways is more space to do or not do more space to participate or not participate. 

Eric: Yeah. 

Kris: More space to language, however, works for you because geez, what are we really doing when we're doing language and when we're doing gender? We're trying to relate to one another, and we're trying to share our world with someone else, whether it's to describe it or invite someone into it or what have you. It's about these social connections and it's about relating to one another. Because for me, a lot of this doesn't really matter unless I'm engaged in social relationships. Perhaps for other people it does. Perhaps when they're alone and disconnected from the world, it still matters. But somebody cut me off. It's turning salad buffet. 

Eric: Well, I think Kris brought up something, it's a theme that I know I wrestle with a lot that we talk about in the book that is kind of central to my chapter that I wrote on Italian and that really is participation. If gendering, I want to insist on that as this sort of verbalness of it, the doingness of it, if gendering to oneself, to others, conceptually, ideologically, and there are all sorts of ways of doing, right? If gendering allows for greater participation, great. If gendering forecloses participation, ooh, this is where I think we need to throw a flag on the pitch and we need to start saying. It also verts back as my thinking about, like, it really is not about gendering, it's about the person doing the gendering. That's the crux of the issue. I think Kris and I, I think all feminist linguistics, trans queer linguistics different critical approaches. We're trying to radically recenter and expand the space for the human. Our disciplinarity tends to push humans out to the side, including some very famous linguists who are entirely dismissive of the human.

Carrie: Yep.

Eric: Except in their idealized cis, white, middle-class, straight anglophone space. We all had to swallow a lot of that to get through our graduate programs and so forth. So, that'll be the end of my critique of that. But I think this act of rethinking gendering and rethinking of languaging is an act of re participating the human and also recentering the human. Because really at the end of the day, that's what it is. It's about humans and their relation with other humans, and also their relation with themselves. I think gendering, whether we all, like there are four of us in this virtual room, we're doing it in different ways, potentially for probably something fourth of the fourth power, right? Different ways at different times. But it is still something that, at least in our anthropological settings, is really, really important. It's highly salient aspect of our being, of our doing, of our existing, of our thinking and understanding. If we can shake that up, if we can give people new questions about gendering about what it means to gender, the self, the others, the society, then I think I feel like I feel like we can be happy with what we're doing. Again, the humans have to be the center of all of this. 

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. I'm agree in that, yeah. I don't know. I'll say linguist this time. Because I mean, linguist not just people, we remove the language from the person too often. Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah, in this case, yes. Linguists is more relevant. Yeah. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Eric: I just want your...

Carrie: I just want to let the linguist off the hook. 

Megan: Yeah, absolutely.

Eric: I feel like the latter half of my career has been about challenging that. I know Kris has been a great inspiration for this, our conversations, not just about the book, about other things, but I feel like I and we are swimming against not only just habits of languaging about language, right? We just say like, "Oh, French has this and Italian does that, and so forth. You can't do this in German or something all these like habits that we have, but we're also pushing against really strong disciplinary forces, right? 

Megan: Absolutely. 

Eric: I remember being a graduate student and sitting in, I think it was a government and binding syntax class, which is the class that convinced me that I would never be a syntactician. Hearing about this theory that's supposedly accounted for syntax, the way people organize clauses, phrases, sentences, utterances, and so forth, and thinking, "This doesn't even work for the English being used around me, let alone the other languages I use on a daily basis. What the fuck is the point? What? What?" Everyone turned to colleagues of mine, fellow graduate students who came from different linguacultural backgrounds as well as ones that they shared with me, French speakers, Dutch speakers, and so forth. Saying, like, "Can you make this work without massive amounts of tricks?" I think gender is something like that too. We over-theorize, or we give theory the wrong type of power when we go into this. Ideally theory helps us ask better questions with perhaps more acumen or gives us maybe some common ground to stand on with the people that we're talking to and speaking with and asking questions of and so forth. But the theory isn't true. 

Carrie: No. It's no.

Eric: But we forget that, and we are told to forget that time and time again in our fields. I've only ever been a linguist, so I don't want to answer for other disciplines, but I feel like this really needs to be a question that linguists have to start wrestling with. Otherwise, they are forgetting that we are fundamentally talking about ourselves. We're not saying anything about the objects that we purport to be studying. I'm not sure we can, frankly, on a vast theoretical level, anyway. Okay. Kris, now it's your turn to cut me off. 

Kris: It doesn't exist without us, so before us. Yeah, I like listening to talk about what we're pushing back to in our disciplines. I think maybe for as much as the thing that you are productively stuck on as participation. I think that maybe thinking about my role as a language educator really explains the piece that I think is productive, but that I'm absolutely stuck on for sure is being expansive, right? Making our disciplines bigger, making our worlds bigger. We think through two different frames that often lead us to the same point, perhaps after a bit of back-and-forth productive arguing. But for me, there's a tendency to want to pin down and get this final answer because on Monday, I'm walking into class and I'm teaching this. So if there are limitless pronouns or limitless forms for this, but what am I supposed to teach on Monday? What am I supposed to say when someone asks me, "What are all the options?" I think for me, I'm thinking about like having this conversation with students, building on people. Anne Charity Hudley, Mary Buckholtz, and who else was on that? 

Megan: Kristen Mallison. 

Kris: Yeah, talking about like, why is your linguistics so small? 

Erick: Why, yes.

Kris: Why does it have to be harmful? I think thinking with people having those conversations, that's what I'm asking of language teachers. Yes, you have to teach something concrete, but there's nothing stopping you from teaching something a little bit bigger. 

Eric: How do you teach it that way? 

Kris: Yeah, teaching that I'm teaching you a small number of forms, right? I'm probably teaching you traditional, very binarys forms, and then maybe I'm doing better and I'm adding on a couple of other forms that are representative of the kinds of other pronoun forms and structures that may exist. But then I'm really trying to teach you that I could never possibly teach you everything, that the book could never possibly be exhaustive, and that it stuck in time. It's stuck in the linguistic worlds of the people who wrote it and of the people who crammed it into the boxes that they thought they could sell at the mass market. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Kris: For me, I think that's where I really get stuck on it has to be bigger, and we have to teach this underlying thinking. As linguists who are doing studies and coming here to say that this is how language is functioning in this particular context at this particular time, all of us have to really get messier. I don't know exactly how to put it, but just accept that there is not finality. Let's all be a little more trans in the way that we think. 

Carrie: Yeah, I love that. 

Eric: I always think like, yeah, let's all be queer, right? 

Carrie: Yeah.

Eric: I think some of this, Kris and I have talked about it several times in our roles as instructors, faculty, mentors, and so forth. But I think one of the things we can also do is model the expansiveness, model the anchoredness at times, and model the tentativeness even in some of the things we're asserting and we're trying to describe. I think that's really important for us to do. I feel like sometimes, not just in our publication and our research work, but just in our pedagogical work, we forget that we're in this really privileged and powerful gatekeeping role, and we need to keep that in mind, right?

Eric: We try to do this throughout the book. We try to model how we want to see other folks. Maybe attend the language and attend to gendering and languaging and so forth. But I hope that comes out in other aspects. Of course, I fail all the time in this, so I don't want to pretend imperfect by any stretch. I think that's the work, right? That's the work of radically recentering humans too, because we are also human. We can do that to and through and among ourselves as well as just in these really delightful, wonderful places that we have, that we've been afforded, which is the classroom and our spade, and our position within it. It really is just a wonderful thing to be in, right? Of course, we have to meet these goals, and I think about this constantly, even when it comes to teaching them to write in academic English, right? Which is really, we'll do and say like, "It's a form of social violence and symbolic violence.

Carrie: Yeah, absolutely.

Eric: Yet, I also recognize that for a lot of these students, being able to do that, being able to play that game in that way, affords less precarity, affords more participation, affords the potential to do power. That's really important and allows me, and maybe we'll allow other voices in, but it's attention, right?

Carrie: Yeah.

Eric: I've never found the perfect way to do it. So I just lead with like, "Well, this is bullshit, but I mean, this is the bullshit that is being required for you." We can do it while knowing it's what it is. 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Eric: I think we can do the same thing with gender. You go to a French-speaking environment.

Carrie: Yeah.

Eric: It's kind of bullshit, right? Most people are very like this heteronormative and there were ways of understanding languaging in a system that has emerged from the doing that has been in class and so forth. You need to know that. Sometimes you're going to need to just fake it and play to that, but you can also know that this is just a game.

Carrie: Yeah.

Eric: Metaphorically speaking, it is not the way God created, or the gods, or evolution, or whatever mythology that you hold to about that. This is not something that is prideistic like this is something that's done and redone and iterated and reiterated, and we're all just trying to figure out a way to do that in the best, most humanistic way possible.

Kris: It's that tension between doing symbolic violence and teaching symbolic competence in my mind, right?

Eric: Yeah. 

Carrie: Yeah.

Kris: We have to teach that there are more possibilities, and we also have to teach what the power game is and what are some options for navigating it and pushing back again against it, if you so choose and heads up, you'll probably encounter someone who says, that's not French, right? 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Kris: A lot of times people will say, "Well, that doesn't exist in French." They'll say, "Well, probably not for you." If that's your perspective on it from John, I'm guessing that you're not involved in the linguacultural communities where this is happening. 

Megan: Yeah.

Kris: Your experiences are not the limits of reality. Your world is not the only world. 

Carrie: Right.

Kris: I think teaching students also how to language about that and just honor their agency to decide when and where, and whether to push back against those things is the orienter there.

Eric: Just like in our intellectual worker, our role is researcher, scholar, and we're pulling back these layers and trying to denaturalize and re-question that which has been naturalized and rendered unquestionable. We can model this for students too, and we can do it in a way that says like, okay, doing language is doing power as well. 

Megan: Right.

Eric: This is going to be happening and we can sort of lead with that. What I find really enriching about it is that they will run with this farther than I intended. Like most of the time, the students are far smarter than I am. They're far more creative. I'm old and gray haired and more mortgage and all these other things that render my life rather dull. They're on the cutting edge of this, and that's what they should be. That's what 18 to 24, 25 should be, right? It's this wonderful age of questioning and living and upturning and undoing and unraveling that I think can be really beautiful. If we can give them some skills for that, even as we give them the skills to play within this symbolic system that will allow them to fuck with the patriarchy or the patriarchies. I'm not super convinced about that term, but it does roll off its tongue nicely, right? Yeah, I think we're doing our job, or at least I hope we're doing our job and hope is sort of like really all we have about this, right? Because we can't know the future. 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Eric: We can't know what's going on in other people's minds. 

Carrie:  Barely know what's going on on my own.

Eric: No kidding, yeah. I mean, definitely.

Carrie: Well, this has been a really great conversation. Are there any last words you want to leave our listeners with? 

Eric: I would love to hear from people that want to be a part of our next volume and the next set of conversations that we're trying to hold space for. So reach out to Kris or myself. I'm sure there's a way to get our emails and stuff somewhere.

Carrie: Yep, absolutely.

Eric: Also, you can just Google us, like, you know.

Carrie: Yeah, you're Googleable.

Kris: The internet.

Eric: The interwebs are all out there, right? 

Kris: Yeah, I think maybe we should close out much like we left off in the book and invite every person to think constantly and reiteratively about how we do language.

Carrie: Yeah.

Kris: How we do gender and think about our doings and how our doings can make our imaginary worlds bigger, more equitable, more connected, and more just for all of us. [foreign language]

Carrie: I love that. Beautiful.

Kris: Thanks for having us.

Eric: Thank you so much. It's been a great pleasure.

Megan: Yeah, thanks for coming.

Carrie: Thank you so much for having this amazing conversation with us. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: We obviously were listeners with one and final message. Don't be an asshole.

Megan: Don't be an asshole.

Kris: [foreign language]

Eric: Put my name right on that one as well.

[END]