Movements to promote gender inclusive linguistic innovation in Romance languages like Portuguese, French, and Spanish have been met with language policies prohibiting such practices. This paper examines the discursive practices in both the movements to promote and restrict gender inclusive language in South America, with a particular focus on Brazil and Argentina. We first analyze how linguistic activism focused on corpus planning mirrors feminist movements that successfully altered language practices. We then interrogate the reactions to these movements, which we argue takes the form of homophobic and transphobic educational language policies that are based in hegemonic discursive practices that marginalize and minoritize.

This paper is grounded in Critical Language Policy theory (Tollefson, 2015), which aims to interrogate the historical and structural mechanisms that promote deficit language ideologies and reify marginalizing linguistic hierarchies. Multi-modal discursive data were collected, including official and unofficial policy texts, images of public signs, and political advertisements and speech. Analysis incorporated intertextual (Fairclough, 1992) and multimodal (Machin, 2013) critical discourse analysis to examine how messages circulate across policy texts and are then represented within other semiotic resources, like public billboards and political advertisements.

Based on data analysis, we argue that (1) attempts to silence gender inclusive language efforts are connected across language policies by prescriptive language ideologies and a common interest in marginalizing both new linguistic practices and the people advocating for them; (2) a clichéd discursive device that promotes “protecting children” is deployed to support policies that, in fact, harm kids who identify as LGBTQ+; and (3) the focus on language change obfuscates the right-wing agenda of silencing LGBTQ+ individuals and the movements that support LGBTQ+ rights.