Meghan Rennie

All French nouns have a gender (male or female). As there is no inherent rationale behind which gender a given word has (at least, no rationale which an anglophone brain can readily grasp), many French learners find genders difficult to learn. This assignment was an opportunity for Meghan to hone her French skills whilst creating a useful learning/studying tool for fellow language learners. She leveraged the visual language of traditional gender norms to emphasize each vocabulary item's win-state.

Simultaneously, this game brushes against the oddness of gender: "Why is lipstick masculine? Why is pizza feminine? Why is skeleton masculine, but with a suffix usually corresponding to the feminine? Why is any word anything?" By introducing her majority-non-French-speaking class to French vocabulary--to a system of gendering which provides no clear logic but demands total adherence--she provoked a broader consideration of the gendered systems already accepted in our daily lives.