Snippets from the Italian Scene
On Gender in Italian
I was recently surfing the net and came across a site with recipes, book promotions and other things by somebody named Andrea. The English was serviceable but felt foreign, so I assumed the site was Italian, and hence that Andrea was a male -- Andrew. Until I clicked upon an "About Andrea" button and beheld a photo of a woman chef. The site's American, and Andrea's a feminine name in the English-speaking world. And I suddenly found myself thinking back to college days, when there was a great deal of earnest discussion about male-domination of the language -- using the masculine gender as a catch all (let everyone take his peach and his sandwich) and so on. In Italian there are no assumptions about the gender of the possessor, as the possessive takes the gender of the noun it modifies: the phrase above becomes "che ogni uno prenda la sua pesca (feminine) ed il suo panino (masculine)."
But there certainly are masculine and feminine in Italian. Some groups of words tend to be attributed to one gender and others to the other, for example most sports are masculine whereas most of the arts and intellectual pursuits are feminine, but I have never heard anyone comment upon or object to this. Where one does sometimes hear comments regarding gender domination is in referrals to groups of people: his or her female friends is "le sue amiche"; if there's a male thrown in it becomes "i suoi amici." According to Suisy Blady, an Italian comedienne and author who also does fascinating travel shows, this is done because the lone male doesn't want to have his gender cast into doubt, and she may be right. The other, much more serious place where one gets gender domination is in references to the professions. A medical doctor is un medico or un dottore, a journalist un giornalista, a geologist un geologo, and so on. It would be comparatively easy to correct the problem, simply by changing the gender of the noun (e.g. una giornalista, una dottoressa), and this is slowly happening; curiously enough right now some of the people who object most strongly to the practice are women who fear that they'll be considered in a lesser light if they don't use the masculine term to describe their professions. In the space of a generation this will likely change, especially because women make up more than 50% of the student body enrolled in Italian universities. But I'll still be wary of making assumptions about an Andrea's gender unless I see a photo.
Thoughts on Italian food
On Italian wine
On
living in Italy
Send a card from the
Italian Cuisine Post Office, or browse the photos!
