Luise F. Pusch

Luise F. Pusch (born 14 January 1944 in Gütersloh, Germany) is a German linguist. She is regarded as the co-founder of feminist linguistics in Germany, along with Senta Trömel-Plötz.

Life and education
Luise Pusch studied English, Latin and linguistics at the University of Hamburg. In 1972 she received her doctorate in English. In 1978, she qualified for the linguistics faculty at the University of Konstanz. From 1979 to 1984 she was a Heisenberg Fellow in the field of feminist linguistic research. Before feminist linguistics became her specialty, she worked on syntactic issues such as construction of gerunds. From 1982 to 1985 she held professorships in English and German in Leibniz University Hannover and in the University of Duisburg-Essen. In 1985, she was named adjunct professor at the University of Konstanz. In 1990-1991, she was professor for women's studies at the University of Münster. Since 1986, Pusch has been partnered with U.S. Germanist Joey Horsley from Boston, and splits her time between there and Hannover.

Career
In the mid-1970s, U.S. feminists such as Robin Lakoff and others had begun to pay attention to the gender discrimination inherent in the language itself, and the way it was used. Feminist linguistics didn't originally develop out of the academic linguistic discipline, but from theoreticians within oppressed groups. From those beginnings, it was brought into the field of linguistics by two professors of linguistics, Senta Trömel-Plötz and Pusch who started the program of Feminist linguistics at the University of Konstanz. The first essays to appear in Germany about the topic were in 1979 in the journal Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie, and in 1980 in Linguistische Berichte.

Since the 1970s Pusch has been committed to a gender-appropriate language, for example in essays, commentary, discussions, lectures and workshops.

In 1976 she started to write the autobiographical novel Sonja about her relationship to a suicidal partner. After finishing it in 1979 it got published in 1980 under the pseudonym Judith Offenbach and turned out to be a significant influence to the German-language lesbian movement of the time.

In her 1980 essay, "German as Men's Language: Diagnosis and Therapy Ideas" (Das Deutsche als Männersprache. Diagnose und Therapievorschläge), she wrote that standard German has a built-in bias favoring males, that this is problematic, and that the simplest solution to the problem lies in partial de-genderization of the language. To that end, the feminine suffixes -in and -innen could be done away with and (contrary to the existing usage of the language) the male article (der / ein) of the noun would be replaced by the female version (die / eine); female professors would become, simply, "die Professor" (instead of Professorin) or "eine Schriftsteller" (writer) instead of Schriftstellerin.

Due to the expected non-acceptance of such a proposal, she pleaded for the stepped up use of Binnen-I (e.g., SchülerIn (schoolchild) ) in order to avoid use of the paired-word form, Schülerinnen und Schüler (schoolgirls and schoolboys). Besides her linguistic work, she built a biographical database containing the biographies of 30,000 women.

Awards
The association BücherFrauen, a network of women in the book industry, chose Luise F. Pusch as "BookWoman of the Year" 2004. On her 70th Birthday, Pusch was honored with the commemorative Sprachwandlerin award. The Darmstadt-based Luise Büchner Society awarded Pusch their 5th Luise Büchner Prize for Media studies in November 2016.

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