“A SMALL FORM OF RESISTANCE” AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. ERIN MOBERG Dr. Erin Moberg teaches in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. Can you explain the issue of gendered language in Spanish classrooms? EM: There are kind of different sects of what is considered an academic register, what’s considered formal enough and what isn’t. I study Chicano and Chicana cultural production and theater, so for me it’s fundamental to what I’m doing if I want to articulate what I’m talking about. A lot of what I’m looking at has to do with the fact that in Spanish the masculine can speak for the whole. So in Spanish you say “Chicanos plus Chicanas still equals Chicanos,” formally. Is this an issue a lot of people are aware of? I think I’m definitely in a minority in terms of the degree to which I pay attention to that and am very conscious and careful of who I’m referring to. And there are certainly people who would argue that there are no implications for that, but I strongly disagree, there
are huge implications for that, especially when you’re looking at a room of people who exist across spectrums of gender and sexual identity and ethnic identity. What alternatives are out there for people trying to be conscious of who they are referring to? In orthography one way to get around using o/a is the @ symbol, and I kind of use it for lack of something better to use, and sometimes because it’s less clumsy than constantly writing Chicana/o. It’s a small form of resistance, but after centuries of it being the other way around, hopefully calling attention to that, even if a student notices “okay there’s another way to think about this” or “oh, language has meaning in ways beyond what the word itself means.” And is this mostly a written form, or is this something that can be applied in conversation? EM: I actually had to deal with that yesterday in my Thesis defense, so every time I wanted to articulate a point about gender inequities or sexual inequities I had to