Inclusive Writing: Tracing the Transnational History of a French Controversy

This article documents the linguistic, disciplinary, geographical and ideological circulation of the notion of ‘inclusive writing/d’écriture inclusive’ in order to understand the French controversy surrounding the term. The article shows that North American Protestant feminist theologists first spread the expression in the 1970s. The expression then circulated in feminist circles in English and French, in Europe and North America, but also in the fields of disability and peda- gogy. Its success in the French space, however, is not only due to its Protestant roots but also to a republican definition of inclusion emerging in France in the 1990s. By the time the controversy shot up, the paradigm of inclusion was thus loaded with its French republican meaning as much as its English and/or North American meaning, creating an ideological paradox that limits inclusive writing’s critical capacity and fails to question relations of domination.