On the first day of our gender-and-sexuality unit, I startled everyone by smacking myself in the face mid-discussion with one of the style guides that Professor Lunsford had brought for our perusal. I regret having caused the disturbance—not least because the gesture had nothing to do with the topic at hand—but I reacted on pure instinct to an example of good intentions gone bad. Permit me to explain.
From the perspective of gender neutrality, the substitution makes sense: why preserve a seemingly antiquated, clearly masculine term if a gender-neutral option exists—particularly if the individual thus titled is a female? As Paula Treichler and other feminist linguists emphasize, language both reflects and shapes culture, so linguistic and cultural change must at some point join forces on the march toward utopia. But history and precision, it seems, risk becoming casualties of the more militant movements for equity (of gender, ability, and race). The distinctive (sub-?)culture of Western classical music holds as negative a record toward gender parity as perhaps any other institution. As a woman and a musician, this fact dismays me. As a historian, I have tried to create a more complete historical record by writing and teaching about women in music. I do heed gender considerations as I work; I try, for example, to avoid the phrase “woman composer,” since it suggests an exceptionalism that the historical record does not necessarily support. Yet, I cannot fathom the circumstance in which I would employ concert leader or concert director. Concertmaster, for all its masculine connotations, is as historically accurate as foreman (of a jury; of a plantation; of a construction project). Moreover, it is also accurately job-specific in a way that neither of the suggested alternatives can match. A grain of historical truth accompanies concert leader, in that the concertmaster actually did lead the orchestra before the advent of the modern conductor in the early nineteenth century. Concert director, however, invites confusion with the role of conductor (or director, as a wind ensemble leader occasionally is called) and with the various organizational support positions attached to a professional orchestra. For the sake of historical accuracy and contemporary clarity, I would no more call a 21st-century woman principal violinist a concert director than I would an 18th-century male in the same position. Nor would I tolerate an editor who insisted on changing my terminology to align with a personal (ahistorical) agenda, no matter how well intended.
You bring up a great point about words being historically accurate. If we look at it rhetorically and Foucauldianly, all discourse has its moment and we must situate all uses of rhetoric along their trajectories of use. Terms may certainly have been accurate at a certain historical moment, and--as you say--they were accurate because the reality supported such use of the word. Tradition of use, though, seems to haunt us as we enter new realities in which the subjects of that use have changed: we no longer have just male foremen heading jury rooms or contruction sites but female. There a sense, then, of not revising history but of revising tradition.
ReplyDelete