Gender-Sternchen, Binnen-I oder generisches Maskulinum, … (Akademische) Textstile der Personenreferenz als Registrierungen?

Abstract

For more than 40 years, a debate on gender-related person references has been taking place in the German-speaking world. My contribution starts with a differentiation of four registers, which are currently practiced in writing and have developed specific reasoning discourses and specific social contexts of usage, as I try to show. I am going to examine these four styles of gendered person reference as “registers” in the sense of anthropological linguistics (Agha 2007). This concept of “enregisterment” implies that the producers connect themselves to a socio-symbolic cosmos and can be perceived with cultural evaluations (in production and re­ception), for example, as conservative, feminist, queer, liberal (Kotthoff 2017). Here I shall explore their (socio)linguistic underpinnings within conceptions of language ideology in order to grasp the communication-reflexive charges of these discourses.