Kheiron Module 3

Mercedes Bengoechea states that, just as our society is built on structures that hierarchise and discriminate, it is normal that our way of communicating aims to preserve these hierarchies and that our belief systems make us see elements that may be unjust as normal, because our conceptual frameworks are based on inequality (Martín, 2019). The most dangerous element here is the power of words to change aspects of our minds such as reasoning or decisions, but above all, and what occupies this work, they can change beliefs and ideas (Sigman, 2022). In what ways can language, or its different use, shape the way societies think about, or create realities. Lera Boroditsky (2018) also wonders about this, as well as the consequences that linguistic structures can have on how people think. She resolves that language shapes thought and gives a number of examples to demonstrate this around grammatical gender. In languages such as Spanish or German, where all nouns, everything that can be named, have a masculine or feminine gender, this can have consequences such as the following: the moon in Spanish has a feminine grammatical gender, and is an element that in our conceptual framework is purely linked to femininity; in children's stories, it is even depicted with eyelashes (as if men did not have them). In German, on the other hand, the sun is grammatically feminine and the moon masculine. Boroditsky and his experiments conclude that a German speaker would describe the sun with adjectives associated with femininity and a Spanish speaker the other way around. How dangerous is it that everything that can be named has a grammatical gender, masculine or feminine, with its connotations and stereotypes? 12