The Role of Language in Including LGBTQIA+ Identities in the Foreign Language Classroom

Introduction

‘I drove two husbands around the city’. That was the answer by a student to a question intended to focus on the uses of the simple past in one of my classes on Portuguese for Spanish Speakers. The goal of the question was to activate students’ knowledge of the preterit. Nonetheless, another student noted the use of ‘two husbands’ (dois esposos in Portuguese) and the discussion turned to the expression of gender identities in Romance Languages.

The word ‘esposo’ both in Spanish and Portuguese relate to a person whose gender identity lies in the masculine spectrum, or as some would say, ‘a man’. Whereas we, as educators, understand the importance of acknowledging identity in the language classroom, the understanding of gender identity as a binary representation of humanity is simply put, not enough for the diverse array of identities people present nowadays. One of the students asked if they were married to each other or if they were two friends who happened to be somebody else’s husbands.

It is an ambiguous sentence in Portuguese (and in English) indeed. The classroom reaction was not homophobic or non-inclusive. The students were interested in understanding that situation. In order to avoid the ambiguity of “two husbands,” in the end, the students opted for ‘a couple’.

The situation explained above shows how language shapes our understanding of identities. I asked the students what the first image that came to mind was when they wrote “a couple”. The previous conversation had probably altered our perception of the imbedded meaning of ‘couple’, and most students refused the image of a man and a woman as the passengers in the initial story. Nonetheless, most words bring rooted meanings as several researchers have shown. Holgado (2018) discusses this concept based on a study published in Science in 2017. According to the author, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Andrei Cimpian and Lin Bian proved that stereotypes influence our perceptions of gender from an early age. These gender labels tend to be reproduced in Education. Foreign Language textbooks, for instance, tend to represent women in jobs stereotypically associated to domesticity and men as the providers (Washcinewski et al, 2017; Nemi Neto, 2018, Narloch, 2020; Vieira et all, 2022).

As much as language evolves, changes, and responds to our social norms, gender identities also respond to the anxieties of the times. As an example, one can observe an article published by New York Magazine (Kern & Malone, 2015) in regards to gender identity and sexual orientation among college students in the United States. The article presents more than twenty different designations for gender identity and sexual orientation. If society’s understandings of gender identities change, it is only natural, that citizens will try to use the necessary language in order to express ourselves.

Notwithstanding, most foreign language courses rely on the personal to build the knowledge in the target language. Students talk about their physical descriptions, nationalities, their families, their daily routines, their friends and so on, yet there is a gap in regards to their gender expression. Under those circumstances, why do teachers still resist to talk about such an important part of our lives? Instructors might, in many languages, rely on the word ‘a person’ in order to maintain a vague description of their personal lives (For instance, in Portuguese, French and Spanish, one can use, ‘uma pessoa,’ ‘une personne’ or ‘una persona’ in order to avoid the gendering of their partner).