The LSA Romance Languages and Literatures Department’s RLL Gender Diversity Committee is planning to develop materials to facilitate discussions surrounding gender diversity and identity in University of Michigan classrooms. The committee plans to utilize funds from the LSA New Initiatives/New Instruction Grant, which was awarded to the committee and a team of 15 departmental collaborators in summer 2022. The grant will provide funding for the department through December 2023.
Nick Henriksen, associate chair of RLL and chair of the committee, told The Michigan Daily he noticed a need for educational change once he assumed his position on the board of the department in fall 2019.
“There were a number of students — early on when I became Associate Chair — who reached out to us, (including) students who were nonbinary or (transgender), but also allies of them who were in classes and just didn’t feel like the curriculum was very welcoming,” Henriksen said.
As a native French speaker, Sabine Gabaron, a French Department lecturer and a founding member of the committee, told The Daily she found the French language to be limiting in terms of expressing gender identity.
“I grew up with this idea of gender being given to objects and how the language is very much gender-driven, and I grew up in that culture — not really questioning it at all,” Gabaron said. “As the years were going by, and as I was teaching, I started reflecting on what those genders meant, because I had to teach it to (my) class(es) in an intelligible way, to American students and also international students, who had to try to understand what it meant to give a gender to objects.”
Gabaron said she reached out to Henriksen in fall 2019 to ask how she could thoughtfully teach the Romance languages in relation to gender. Henriksen said he got in touch with the lead of the RLL department’s diversity committee to create a subcommittee focused on these issues, which ultimately became the RLL Gender Diversity Committee.
In most romance languages, there are gendered terms for pronouns, adjectives, nouns and more. There aren’t many easily accessible linguistic terms that are no gendered.
With the motto “all identities are RLL identities,” the committee aims to create a public awareness campaign to promote their efforts dedicated to creating an inclusive space for the gender diverse community within the department. According to Henrikson, the committee seeks to ensure the 3,337 enrolled students, as well as the department’s faculty, are aware of the resources available.
Henriksen said the department’s curricula had not previously recognized of the existence of gender diverse communities in Romance-speaking countries that use gender nonbinary pronouns.
“That seemed incompatible with the cultural moment that we’re in,” Henriksen said. “The most recent (diversity, equity and inclusion) survey of undergraduate students indicated that 24% identified as LGBTQ+, so it seemed like we needed to serve our students better.”
Gabaron said comprehending new languages often involves understanding perceptions of gender and gender-neutral language in various cultures.
“Language is not just a language on its own,” Gabaron said. “There’s a cultural component to the words that we use, so the choice of pronouns and the choice of language that you’re going to use are going to be a reflection of the culture.”
Henrikson said the textbooks used to teach each of the five Romance languages available to students in the department cover grammatical gender in a binary way. The first initiative the committee undertook was to create morphology tables that break down singular and plural third-person masculine, feminine and neutral/nonbinary pronoun options. These resources can currently be accessed on RLL’s website under the “Gender Diversity Committee” tab.
Other efforts made by the committee include incorporating a disclaimer on course syllabi that promotes exploration of gender-diverse language in the classroom. The committee has also set out to create supplementary materials for all course levels that integrate gender diversity topics and still meet the learning outcomes of the respective course.
LSA junior Mallery Bee, an undergraduate research assistant for the RLL Gender Diversity Committee, told The Daily they have been impressed by the positive feedback the department’s curriculum coordinators have given to their efforts.
“There is a big risk there because we’re going in and making changes to a curriculum that (department coordinators) put together, but they were super receptive and super kind,” Bee said.
As they work on the development of both Spanish and Catalan materials, Bee said they hope students see the initiative as a purely educational effort.
“I really hope that people see (our efforts) as a first step and not a final solution because really we’re just starting and there’s not a lot to go off of,” Bee said. “I hope that people recognize that we are learning along with them and that we feel really passionate about it.”
Rackham student Laura Pensa, a graduate student instructor and researcher for the RLL Gender Diversity Committee, is an international student whose first language is Spanish. Pensa told The Daily about how many members of the LGBTQ+ community are not taught the words they need to express aspects of their identity in their language classes, such as how to discuss their affection, relationships and kinship.
“I do feel like learning a language and teaching a language is like giving someone the key to open a whole new world of meaning, (and) that can be a very liberating thing,” Pensa said. “Speaking from personal experience, learning a second language during my adolescence was a way to say things that I couldn’t say in my own language. That doesn’t need to be the case for everyone, but if there is someone that is going through that situation, they really need those tools.”
Daily Staff Reporter Alexandra Vena can be reached at alexvena@umich.edu.