Venusberg | Lodged in the teeth of modernity

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

I was told about splats and spivaks a few years ago, but only t'other day did I rouse myself to find out more about this sparticular interface of gender identity and online gaming, two great tastes that taste great together. I don't know if it was the first usage, but the only extant one, unless I am spelling "Spivak" wrong, is this one.

It struck me as interesting that there didn't seem to be an exact delineation between "neuter" and "spivak" - spivak seems to be a non-gendered gender, whereas neuter does not partake of gender. Maybe, however, the answer to the question "what's the difference between neuter and spivak?" is "one is it and one is e" - the pronominal usage either avoids or subverts the "he/she" parallel. So, hmmm.

The splat, despite silly name, also does something quite interesting. One of the potential uses or importances of the epicene (itself a complicated adjective) that has become relevant in the last decade or so is the proliferation of situations in which one might not have immediate access to the cues whereby you might normally conclude a gender usage, either through intention or simple unfamiliarity.

However. The splat usage is a chosen, programmed attribute. That is, it doesn't mean "I don't know enough about your gender to call you he or she with a certainty of correctness, so I will use this form as a temporary or permanent solution", but rather "I want to conceal or defer how I stand in terms of binary gender, and am using a technological system to do so". Which is interesting... the closest example I can think of, in a way, is the Miss/Mrs/Ms. thing, which came up in the shouty thread linked above also. That is, Ms. was an innovation that allowed one to emply the structures of title (as a "splat" is able to use pronouns) without revealing whether or not one was married. Except the use of the wild card asterisk makes it even harder to translate into speech.

So, how many genders do you think you need, for personal use and to describe the world around you? Are splats and spivaks, or anything of that ilk, meaningful to you?

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