Éliane ViennotLe langage inclusif : pourquoi, comment

Bye Bye Binary’s selection for their storefront.

In her books and speeches, Eliane Viennot shows when and how the French language was masculinised. In this one, she tells the story and the intertwined power relations, and afterwards suggests simple ways to make our language more inclusive. Even if our collective says bye bye to the midpoint as a solution to everything, this book is important to understand how we came to consider sexist language as neutral. We also secretly dream of reading a fanzine with the best quotes from Elianne Viennot bashing the French academy.

“The violent controversy that arose in France in the autumn of 2017 around “inclusive writing” led Éliane Viennot to broaden the question to “inclusive language”. In this short guide, the author of Non, le masculin ne l’emporte pas sur le féminin! sets out the good reasons for ridding the language of masculinist norms and rules in order to speak and write a world where everyone has a place, on an equal footing. The tools that make this possible exist: all you have to do is apply them to rediscover, in all simplicity, the logic of French, with the inventiveness that its flexibility also allows.”