100242 PS SpraWi: The Dragqueen und the Android (2018W)

Neologisms like “drag queen” or “android” have received widespread recognition i.e. they are found in dictionaries, special encyclopaedias and e-lexicons. The opposite development takes place in reconceptualizations of personal references, which have already been used in pre-feministic times, such as “Frau/woman” respectively “Weib/sexualized woman” or “Zwitter/hermaphrodite”. These are personal references, which would only require a broadening or narrowing in meaning, to adjust the one-sided hetero-masculine categories in dictionaries. Today all three biological human phenotypes (feminine, masculine, intersexual) and all gender identities need to be valued equally in terms of status and, accordingly, they ought to be implemented on a normative level.
The issue regarding the representation of them all should be pursued after more than 40 years of emancipation of women and the ensuing acceptance of gender identities. How and in which way are they all conceptualized and verbalized? Which motivations and norms underlie their word formations to this day? How can we analyze their semantic relations in the micro- and macrostructure of the vocabulary and are they a contemporary representation of all people? It is obvious that there hasn´t been as much change regarding intersexuals due to their recognition in law, which has only changed recently. Less understandable is the current unsatisfactory representation of the biologically female sex and all other sexual identities except for the masculine-heterosexual, which is equated with a sexual hypernym in major dictionaries to this day, thus implying a higher worth of the hetero man in comparison to all others.
Language should be presented independently from ideologies so that it can be referred to in different ways according to the context, neutral “Frau/woman: Mann/man”, meliorative “tolle Frau/great woman: toller Mann/great man” and pejorative “Weib/sexualized woman: Macho/macho”, to name a few. These different representations are ostensibly present with hetero-men but only to a minor extent with hetero-women – with respect to the biological sex “intersexual” or other gender identities there is little to no recognition of that sort. Therefore, neutral references to homosexuals have only emerged through the reinterpretation of pejoratives like “Lesbe/lesbian” and “Schwuler/gay”, all others are – in general – derogatory. When referring to intersexuals, there is no difference between a person, animal and thing, which undermines the human status of the intersexual, but this distinction of the human and the non-human represents an essential hierarchy in German and many other Indo-European languages.
Therefore, the aims of this proseminar are the analysis and deconstruction of the androcentric and partly sexist verbalization of all human beings regarding male heterosexual terms in lexicons based on specific lemmata. The results should be concrete proposals or rather new definitions for the examined hetero-androcentric lemmas. We will work on such reconceptualizations on a lexicological and lexicographical basis through the lens of a human concept that represents the phenomenological plenitude and not just the hetero man.
Furthermore, we will analyze syntactic as well as morpho-semantic problem areas like the preference of the role of the masculine in the gender agreement or the coincidence of the nomen agentis with the masculine personal reference and the divergence of the grammatical and the ‘natural’ gender. Additionally, we will look at (and deconstruct) the amelioration of specific biological sexes and other gender identities in the vocabulary from a semantic and gender symmetrical/-representative perspective.