Inclusive language and queer representation in adoption applications: a contrastive English-Spanish analysis

Abstract

Inclusive language represents a symbolic way of defining the belonging to a community or an attempt to reflect identities and orientations beyond the visibility of women. Although some strategies are starting to be used in order to achieve a more accurate representation of some groups, not all of them are totally acceptable in administrative and legal fields. By justifying the theoretical possibility of destabilizing gender and the ethical responsibility of acknowledging the whole spectrum included in the LGTBIQ+ denomination, this paper studies a corpus of application adoptions in Spanish and English, which allows to explore to which extent the LGTBIQ+ community is represented, a social group who may need to resort to these files. Apart from validating the effect of the used formulas in both languages, with studies from Spanish Linguistics such as Grijelmo’s, the paper will analyse which proposals may be acceptable in this specific context of use, where some advances have been made, but there is still some way to go. However, both languages have their own mechanisms, belonging to the administrative-legal context of use, which do not force speakers to include neologisms or artificial formulas, and are socially accepted: this is why there is a need to study and use them to achieve a representation which the LGTBIQ+ members are still fighting to see.

Keywords: Inclusive language, Gender, LGTBIQ+, Hospitality, Performativity.