Language inclusiveness and law-making in Brazil

What is it about?

Brazilian Portuguese, as a Romance language, is a binary gender-marked language and has forms of address, nouns, and adjectives for feminine and masculine. In cases of mixed-gender groups, or for unknown individuals, or groups where the gender balance is unspecified, the masculine serves as a "false generic". The binary gender designation of Brazilian Portuguese and the use of masculine as default fails to meet the needs of women, LGBT+ people, and non-binary people. Although social movements led by these groups have provoked changes in law-making, which are also reflected in everyday language use, Brazilian lawmakers are still lagging, particularly after the rise of the far-right in the country. Since 2016, as a way of example, at least 34 bills have been proposed against neutral or inclusive language in the different levels of public administration. In this chapter, we reject the claim that the masculine form “implicitly” includes the feminine and the non‑binary forms. We believe that this use undermines gender equality, as true inclusiveness primarily requires the explicit recognition of all groups within the language itself.

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Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The use of gender‑inclusive language, especially the one characteristically of the LGBT+ community, is a controversial topic on social media, as Oliveira et al. (2024) have noted. In law‑making, this lack of representation can be very consequential since it denounces the fact that open choices were made to reproduce and legitimate the invisibility of these groups, affecting their rights to equality and gender expression. In this line, we argued that the masculine default, widely used in Brazilian Portuguese, excludes the explicit representation of women and LGBT+ individuals, reinforcing a structural oversight rather than promoting intentional inclusiveness. We have also aimed to explore whether and how language inclusiveness in Brazil could be examined from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis and Brazilian Feminist Constitutionalism. To do that, we provided the reader with an outlook on grammar gender in Brazilian Portuguese against the backdrop of e advances and drawbacks in the struggle for the rights of the LGBT+ people and women in the country. To do that, we showed how Brazilian lawmakers, particularly from the far‑right, oppose inclusiveness as a strategy to gain supporters, as the public reactions to language inclusiveness on social media showed. In this chapter, we reject the claim that the masculine form “implicitly” includes the feminine and the non‑binary forms. We believe that this use undermines gender equality, as true inclusiveness primarily requires the explicit recognition of all groups within the language itself.