Problems of Gender Identity: Using the Short Story as a Teaching Tool about Gender

Abstract

A well-known riddle goes like this: A man and his son have a serious road accident. They arrive at the hospital. The father is dead. The son is taken into the operating room. The surgeon looks at the young person and cries out: “My son!” How come? Whether at the dinner table or in the classroom, this riddle never fails to provoke discussion. The most far-fetched hypotheses are made when the plain solution stares everyone in the face. So deeply ingrained is gender stereotyping that it takes most people a long time to make the very simple deduction (and a lot do not manage to do so) that the surgeon is the boy’s mother, that is to say not a man, but a woman. In a language like French, with the regrettable habit of not using the feminine form of a noun even when it is possible, especially for prestigious job titles, the problem gets worse as the surgeon becomes “le docteur” or “le chirurgien,”1 thereby suppressing, before it can even be born, any temptation to imagine the medical worker as female. Marina Yaguello (147) commented on the differences between English and French: “English-speaking people are rather better equipped than us French-speaking people, as they have at their disposal a majority of epicene nouns (indifferent to gender) as well as a system of epicene articles and adjectives. So much so that when we read, for example, a first-person narrative, we may well have to read dozens of pages or so before we are able to discover the sex of the narrator.”2