Damned if feminists do, damned if feminists don’t? Political significance of institutional inclusive writing guidelines in a Belgian francophone university

Abstract Over the last decades, some feminists have put pressure on key institutions to convince them to adopt a particular type of linguistic policy, namely inclusive writing guidelines. These guidelines have nevertheless been criticized – by other militants and academics – for risking of falling short of their radical goal, or of their political one altogether. It is therefore worth asking the following question again, in a francophone and contemporary setting: can the implementation of institutional inclusive writing guidelines help pave future developments regarding gender equality, or is it offering a mere formal change of language? This paper starts by presenting a discursive study of the way multiple metadiscourses were juxtaposed and entwined within two sets of a university’s guidelines. Then, two in-depth interviews with the advisor for gender policy of the university offer insights into the institutional process of producing the guidelines, and their recontextualization in workshops. While the first part of the study shows that the “zero discrimination” discourse is largely dominant and absorbs other competing discourses, the analysis of the interviews points to attempts to prevent the guidelines’ total depoliticization. These guidelines turn out to be a hybrid political object, which raises questions about the institutional process of legitimating one type of feminism over others and also invites to reflect on institutional linguistic prescriptivism (verbal hygiene) more generally.