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with a local women’s group, she referred to herself as a “fisherperson” in her application. She did this knowing that an all-female group would read her application and that this group could have feminist leanings. In her own best interests, in this particular context she degendered her language. Fish-plant workers are primarily female, and, as with most factories, the women receive the lowest wages while the higher-paid management is primarily male.24 These women too have complex subjectivities. Some have begun to identify themselves as “fishery workers.” They find “fisher” awkward , and as one woman says, “fisher sounds like something that festers on my back.” Many use the degendered “fishery worker” and apply it to all workers in the fishery. One feminist fish-plant worker and union representative corrects people who use “fisherman” and suggests “fishery worker” as a substitute. She has found it possible to make feminist word choices in part because she works in a female-dominated culture. Her use of “fishery worker” instead of “fisherman” has begun to spread among her female colleagues, especially, I believe, because she is seen as an influential voice within the fish plant. The editor of the community newspaper intersperses both terms, “fisherman ” and “fisher,” in her columns. She believes that if she uses “fisher” exclusively, she will hear complaints from her male friends and family members. Yet she wishes to be fair about it; she states, “Not everyone who fishes is a man.” Her mother, in fact, fishes with her father, and her mother has struggled to gain the respect she feels she deserves as an equal member of a male-dominated profession. She continues to argue to be granted a fishing license, but has met opposition she believes is based on gender. Her role as a fisher’s wife is used by others to define her as “nota -fisherman.” She states that she does not mind being called either “fisherman ” or “fisher.” Women fishers in another Nova Scotia community unanimously prefer to be called “fishermen.” They state that “fisherperson” and “fisherwoman” “offend both the eye and the ear” and that a “fisher” is “a type of weasel”; but their presence on the water in a male-dominated industry is in itself an act of feminism, and from time to time they receive some unpleasant responses from their male counterparts. One woman said, “Sure, I got a few comments I’d just as soon forget…but nothing serious, really.” Another said, “When I worked in an office and [my husband] fished his licence, it was fine, but when I got my own licence, there were people who said there was no need for two licences in one household, that it was a no-no.”25 Social pressure constrains the lives of women in rural fishing communities in more traditional ways than in places where feminism has taken stronger hold, but social change may be pushing up from the grassroots, even as language change works its way into rural fishing towns from elite, academic, and government sources.26 300 (Dis)Locating Language These brief examples illustrate the way language establishes hegemonic relationships between people in interpersonal conversations, and how each choice of terminology is an act of power negotiation. Each linguistic choice reinforces or changes one’s social status and identity within that context . People select their terminology based on their own personal aspirations , politics, and momentary needs, even if it sometimes means biting their tongues in order not to be accused of “stirring up trouble. ” Additionally , fishers are influenced by media messages around them. Use of the degendered “fisher” reflects a class position superior to the traditional use of “fisherman,” which one columnist calls a “fine, honourable, centuriesold , honest, descriptive and universally understood term.”27 Deakin feels that dfo’s and the media’s use of “fisher” is being imposed by a book-educated elite, who are willing to wipe out centuries of cultural usage and selfidenti fication by individual subjects. dfo and the media, Deakin suggests, have capitulated to feminists and with them all sorts of other effete intellectuals whom Deakin describes as “Canada’s English language revisionists ,” “that mysterious band of persons seemingly bent on eradicating the contiguous letters m-a-n from as many long-used, well-beloved words as they can find”—the “ardent proponents of gender-neutral language.”28 It is possible that fishers associate the same “intellectuals” who are degendering the language with those who learned...

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