Bethberry wrote:
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There's been a fair bit of thought and discussion gone into this idea that one can distinguish a conceptual from a linguistic notion and much of it has demonstrated that this idea of a default unspecified gender reference is an erroneous concept--that always, at some place, the lack of specificity falls down, and in its place lies the defining position of one particular specified gender.
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I agree and disagree. I agree in that I think it's correct that the idea of a default unspecified gender reference is an erroneous concept. In other words, when one uses the masculine pronoun in reference to a person whose gender is unknown or unspecified, this reflects certain underlying facts about the speaker's psychology/culture/socio-linguistic background. That is, "linguistic sexism" is
real sexism.
However, I would still draw a distinction. Suppose a person says "Everyone should mind his own business". The speaker has used the masculine pronoun, but this does not necessarily mean that the speaker intended to make a statement only about men. The speaker may very well have viewed "his" as a neutral pronoun in this context - even if the speaker is
wrong about it being neutral. What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that someone who says "Everyone should mind his own business" does not necessarily mean to say "Every male person should mind his own business", much less "Every person should mind his own business, and my conception of 'personhood' is limited to males."
So, the way I see it, Tolkien's choice to use the masculine pronoun for Iluvatar does not necessarily imply that Tolkien was restricting creativity to males within his Legendarium. It certainly does imply that he had certain preconceived notions (perhaps not conscious ones) about the male-female dichotomy; and I do think that there is a kind of androcentrism and implied sexism in both his creation myth and the Judeo-Christian one.