Queer and non-binary inclusive typographic imaginaries

Public radicalities

In march 2017, the first school textbook in France to use inclusive writing, published by Hatier,⁵ caused and uproar.⁶ The Académie Française pronounced that “the multiplication of orthographic and syntactical marks [...] results in a disunited language, creating a confusion that borders on illegibility,”⁷ and confronting the French language with a 'mortal peril.”⁸ However, this statement of principle did not mention any scientific studies to back up its claims.

For all the misgivings, a more inclusive language is emerging, Fig. 2 based on the use of the midpoint, proximity agreement and epicene turns of phrase. Practices and proposals from more militant sources are gaining ground, such as the neutral developed by Alpheratz,⁹ neologisms such as the pronouns “iels” or “celleux”¹⁰ and the use of the signs x, X, æ, o, and E in order to change gender markers.

The spectrum of gender is vast, and it can still be represented in language. To open up language to new subjectivities is to recognise their existence within society. Non-binary language is often criticised as being unusable, but that is to think in terms of rigid linguistic norms and at the same time, to credit these norms with an objectivity and a universality that in fact are questionable–the use of a “neutral masculine” in French, being one example. Now, as feminist epistemology demonstrates, no translation of the world, even if this operation lays claims to scientific objectivity, can offer a position that is totalising, clear and distinct.¹¹ Language must be understood as a cacophonic melting pot, not only as a linguistic phenomenon, but also as a graphic and typographic phenomenon. It is as much a matter of appropriating language, of accepting that it (he, she, they?) is alive as well as normed, as of helping to enrich the imaginary by allowing radicality to influence more utilitarian or mainstream practices. It is to be hoped that in the future one of the concerns of font designers will be to integrate inclusive characters: “We seek not [...] partiality for its own sake but, rather, for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible. [...] The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.”¹²

Baskervvol, non-binary classicism

Baskervvol is BBB’s take on Baskervville by the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT), which was itself a take on Claude Jacob’s Baskerville from 1784, originally designed by John Baskerville in 1750. Fig. 1, Fig. 3 and Fig. 6 John Baskerville is a classic example of the invisibilisation of women in the history of typography. Sarah Eaves, Baskerville’s companion and associate, who took the helm of the print shop after his death, was never credited for her work, despite the fact that she made a significant contribution to developing the typefaces and prints marketed by her husband.¹³ In 1996 the typographer Zuzana Licko designed a typeface in her honor. Since 2018, Baskervvol has been enriched collectively with inclusive glyphs.

Where universities demand the use of Times New Roman, an all-rights- reserved typeface under private license, for scholarly articles, the use of Baskervvol, a font that offers similar stylistic and historical authority but comes with an open license, would allow the introduction of non-binary glyphs into those normative places for the dissemination of knowledge.

Variations

Tristan Bartolini’s Inclusifve is a “typographic system that can be adapted to different fonts.”¹⁴ Fig. 4 Bartolini does not offer new type designs but uses an existing font in order to deploy his propositions for new links, new ductus.¹⁵ A similar approach is evident in the work of Ariel Martín Pérez, based on her own writing, Fig. 5 and of Laura Conant and Léna Salabert, using a typeface of the Fraktur variety. Fig. 7

Medieval cohabitations

Other forms of composition may exist, as well as ligatures. At the workshop held in November 2018, a group of students presented unmelted, collisionless typeface assemblies. On this occasion, Nathan Laurent produced a reformatting of Bossuet’s Discours sur l’Histoire universelle (1681) in which the pronouns and names cohabit on a smaller scale. Fig. 8

These forms bring to mind the kinds of abbreviations that were used in medieval manuscripts and in 16th-century printed documents (and which represent a variety of options that can be reactivated): Fig. 9

• by contraction: a tilde is substituted for the letters deleted from the middle of a word;

• by suspension: the last letters in the word are not written and are replaced by an upstroke or downstroke;

• special signs and Tironian notes¹⁶ replacing frequently used groups of letters.

Although we shall not go deeper here into the abundant palaeographic studies in this field, our own research is itself part of a graphic history that goes back several centuries; just in the same way, historian Clovis Maillet¹⁷ has demonstrated that transidentity experiences are not exclusive to the modern period.

Fanzines: amplifying minor voices

In feminist and LGBTQ+ culture, the fanzine is a privileged form of publication, at once a tool of knowledge, recognition and network construction and a way of writing and being published on personal subjects that are seldom allowed space within publishing.¹⁸ An amateur practice with a limited economy, the fanzine actualises the potential of pirate agency. It is also a way of perverting the straight¹⁹ work ethic which contributes to the enterprise of norming bodies and genders, and a way of subverting the material codes of office automation. Here, the use of A4 paper folded into a section along its main median line queers the standard use of the DIN format. Fig. 10 Published without an ISBN, fanzine texts infuse the radical feminist counterculture while breaking free of their learned circles: “We are less afraid of attacking Haraway with pentacles, hearts and knuckle-dusters; that transforms our relation to the text.”²⁰

Invisibilised bodies, illegible bodies

BBB has also begun to reflect on ableism in the practices and teaching of graphic design. As a number of educators regretfully attest, different visual capacities (impaired, dyslexic, etc.) are not or only marginally addressed in courses on typography and graphics, and this non-consideration impacts professional practices. Paradoxically, however, there is also a need to provide a nuanced response to criticisms touching on the purported illegibility of the inclusive graphics proposed for people with reading difficulties.²¹ This argument is put forward, mainly on social media, in an attempt to invalidate inclusive writing.

This aberration has prompted the Réseau d’Études HandiFéministes (REHF) to condemn the recuperation of disability. On the one hand, it asked persons without disabilities to stop brandishing the argument of blindness, dyslexia or dyspraxia, and on the other hand, people suffering from a disability but having conservative positions on inclusive writing were invited to stop speaking in the name of the entire disabled community.²² REHF draws attention to the sexism at work in the programming of text-to-speech software and notes that work on coding inclusive writing would help solve part of the problem.

Free construction and licences

Based on the modular construction of typography published by the German Institute for Standardisation

(DIN) after the First World War as part of a drive towards industry standardisation,²³ DINdong by Clara Sambot offers a variety of permutations, assemblages and extensions and questions a typographic standard on the basis of its own regulating patterns. Fig. 11 Sambot’s researches are “conceived as open propositions, ready to evolve and not seeking to define fixed or authoritarian rules [...] an attempt to de-gender DIN, typographically speaking.”²⁴

With DINdong it is possible to act directly on the form that connects the é and the e using “variable fonts” technology. Using a cursor, the compositor can choose a state of the font from a set of coordinates of the directional points of the vectors involved in its description.

The numerous variations called up by degenderage (& love)²⁵ also question the notion of the author because the idea is to act on existing typographic forms. Ever since online users have taken charge of webfonts, the number of fonts published under free license has exploded. The most used typographic license is the Open Font License (OFL). Many classic fonts from the history of typography have been and continue to be republished under OFL. The implementation of de-gen-dered and inclusive glyphs does not, therefore, raise any legal problems, which is the case with DINdong.

Sambot starts with DIN 1451 Fette Breitschrift, vectorised by Peter Wiegel, and sets out to deconstruct it with a view to inclusiveness while documenting her process and quoting Wiegel as she goes along. Nevertheless, if the cumulative copyright mechanism foreseen by the license produces a simple way of documenting the filiations, the OFL is, like other free and/or typographic licenses, bogged down in logics that need to be decolonised and depatriarchalized.²⁶ Even if it does not bear specifically on typographic objects, the Collective Conditions for Re-Use license (CC4r) currently being worked on is an attempt to move in this direction.²⁷

A movement, the collective

The intention behind this typographic intervention by Caroline Dath°Camille Circlude is to challenge type designers by adding a glyph, “iel” to existing fonts, both free and otherwise. Fig. 12 The multiplication of these interventions aims to incite typographers (including those who from the outset are less attuned to these questions) to become aware of the issue of non-binary writing and to extend their sets of characters to include non-binary variations. This challenge with a positive message of love is also an intrusion, a pirate raid. It is, at the same time, an invitation to trans and non-binary feminist persons concerned by these issues to work on the graphic material of this language which invisibilises them and even excludes them, just as Kafka wrested a minor literature for Czech Jews from German, a language within which they could exist only in the simultaneous inability either to write or not write.²⁸

Out of this comes the emergence of researches whose centrality and contours are indeterminate and indeterminable, that connect, call out to and augment one another and swarm, like for example the work of Marie-Mam Sai Bellier, Guillaume Sbalchiero, Marine Stephen and Claire Barrault, brought together by Roxanne Maillet and Clara Pacotte (2017); the inclusive and non-binary implementation of the VG5000 by Justin Bihan (2018) and of Cirrus Cumulus by Clara Sambot (2020); the additional glyphs designed by Émilie Guesse, Maisie Harding and Alain Maréchal for JonquinabcRT (2017); the experimental typefaces designed by Sarah Gephart using the regulating strokes of Helvetica, Cooper Black and Bodoni (2016); Construk Sans by Ryan Hicks (2019), who uses the principle of contextual variants to replace gendered markers (“he,” “hers,” “fireman,” etc.) with non-gendered markers “policeman” becomes “police officer,” “latino,” “latinx,” etc.); the use of the @ sign in Spanish to conflate the two gender markers “o” and “a” (l@s chic@s”), etc.

The principles of collective utterance and diffuse production, which are very real for feminist, queer and trans collectives, are difficult to hear in dominant narratives that write the fiction of “creation.” Media space, which is not used to recognising the work of the multitude, will always be tempted to personify the debate. The romantic idea of the Genius perpetuates a myth that is rarely called into question. The caricature of discovery and talent and of individual glorification are two characteristics of this systemic principle that the media apparatus reproduces without worrying too much about the historical distortions it provokes and sustains. Now, inclusive typography has a wider mobilising effect than quarrels over legibility, polemics over the impoverishment of language and misunderstandings about authoriality.

It is here that the issues of pedagogy and transmission come into play for the BBB collective, which demonstrates that it is possible to collectively carry out research using feminist methods and while raising the question of origins–Monique Wittig’s “literary construction site,”²⁹ the pioneering typographic work mentioned above, and Butler’s use of passive forms³⁰ –as fundamental to the understanding of any intellectual or political movement. Although starting out with many teachers in its ranks, BBB is attempting a shared pedagogical experiment in which each member of the collective is placed in the position of a learner (apprenanl), as this is a very new field of research.

Bibliography