1 He, She, It or They…? A Short Reflection upon the Pronoun Debate and Habitus in the Classroom Joshua James Zwisler Our choice of pronouns is normally a clear cut endeavor – he for males, she for females, etc.; and we don’t tend to put any greater thought into the matter. However, our choice of pronouns can greater affect the habitus we construct around us. How so? Habitus is not a given, it is constantly under construction and every utterance shapes or reshapes that reality as human reality is formed through the use of language. The use of pronouns may seem an issue of the smallest class when we consider the shaping of social realities but, it can be of paramount importance to many that inhabit the social reality we occupy as they may not agree or be comfortable with the reality we afford them – and this can be compounded in the classroom. In the classroom, we effectively create a hermetic environment where absolutes can shape the external environment at the end of the class and in this environment; the pronoun debate is of great importance. What is meant by the term ‘habitus’? Habitus, a term coined by sociologist Bourdieu (1990), refers to the way in which we construct and approach social situations – the historically grounded, socially constituted knowledge, skills, beliefs and attitudes that comprise a situation. The use of language in habitus should be obvious – if language forms the building blocks of human reality, it is extendable that language thus comprises the base and formation of habitus as well. Pronouns, a minimal but highly important morphological aspect of language, are intrinsic to creation of habitus. Personal pronouns, as any language teacher, student or research will know; are a morphological word class that encode either endophoric data or data that can not be expressed in other terms (find another term for the word ‘I’ or ‘you’ that doesn’t sound absolutely absurd…) . For third person pronouns, the data encoded is always endophoric i.e. the encoded data is known to the interlocutors and can be replaced by pronoun nouns or nouns. In languages such as English and Spanish where third person pronouns carry gender/sex information, and this is important to habitus as sex and gender convey different social roles and give access to different social realities and identities inside social reality. Sex and gender are different things. Sex refers to the physical configuration of the body, while gender refers to the psychological relationship to sex and social roles and constructs (McElhinny, 2003). Gender as a construct is not a stable phenomenon. Recent sociological enquiry has shown our identities not to be stable facts to be taken for granted, but to be social constructs that are under constant modification and auto-analysis (Brown, 2000; Breakwell, 2010) and