Écriture inclusive (EI) has long been the topic of public debates in France. These debates have become more intense in recent years, often focusing on the higher education system and culminating in the formulation of three separate laws banning it for public administration. In this paper, we investigate the foundations of these conflicts through a large quantitative corpus study of the (non)use of EI in Parisian undergraduate brochures. Our results suggest that Parisian university professors use EI not only to ensure gender neutral reference but also as a tool to construct their political identities. We show that both the use of EI and its particular forms are conditioned by how brochure writers position themselves on non gender-related-related issues within the French university's political landscape, which explains how conflicts surrounding a linguistic practice have become understood as conflicts about larger issues in French society. Our paper thus provides new information to be taken into account in the formulation and promotion of nonsexist language policies and sheds light on how feminist linguistic activism and its opposition are deeply intertwined with other kinds of social activism in present-day France.

Using multimodal conversation analysis this article examines embodied and tactile greetings in social interaction, documenting their change during the Covid-19 pandemic. Recognizing social interaction as foundational for human sociality, we consider greetings as a crucial normative, organizational, and ritual practice for mutually engaging in intersubjective action. Analyses use video recordings made in Switzerland (featuring (Swiss-)German and English as a lingua-franca), focusing on embodied greetings of acquainted people in public spaces at the age of Covid19-a historical moment in which physical proximity and contact are targeted by official measures restricting social interactions. Studying a range of tactile embodied greetings, the paper shows how they change from routine greetings to hesitated, suspended yet still completed ones, and to projected but resisted and refused ones. Furthermore, it reveals some 'new' practices of greeting (elbow/feetbumps, hugs-in-the-air) and their non-straightforward and accountable character, as well as how they sediment and normalize during the pandemic.